


The Chay Ong Casefiles, Volume One: Always Chasing Rainbows.

by Adonisus



Category: Hazbin Hotel (Web Series)
Genre: Dark, F/M, Gen, Humorous, Multi, Mystery, Other, Supernatural - Freeform, Thriller
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-20
Updated: 2021-01-20
Packaged: 2021-03-18 14:35:38
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 14
Words: 35,875
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28868643
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Adonisus/pseuds/Adonisus
Summary: When Private Investigator Chay Ong receives a job offer from one of Hell's Overlords, she finds herself going up against a dangerous new organization attempting to establish itself in Hell's leadership...(Re-formated, multi-chapter version).
Kudos: 1





	1. Waking up.

**Author's Note:**

> (Hazbin Hotel and all related characters are copyrighted by Vivenne Medrano and their respective owners. All original characters created by me.)  
> Note from the Author: As this story was written while the Hazbin Hotel franchise was still somewhat in its infancy, it attempts to follow the rules and canon that had been established at the time it was written. In the future, parts of this story may no longer make sense to the canon as it is later set. Please keep this in mind when reading this in the future.   
> Also, be advised that the following contains content not suitable for children (it IS based on an adult show, after all). Expect lots of foul language, grusome violence, and plot elements that are unwholesome at best.  
> Enjoy!  
> -Adonisus

_**The Chay Ong Casefiles**_ by Adonisus

Volume 1: Always Chasing Rainbows

  
  


  
  


She always had the same damned dreams.

Every night, when the dull red glow of Hell's day gave way to it's dark forboding night, Chay would find herself wrapped snuggly in her 'blanket' (which was really just a pile of old t-shirts), exhausted from the mind-numbing tedium of paperwork and note-taking, and she would breath out the last of the day's stress, and simply allow her conciousness to give rest.

And then she would start hearing the screams.

_Mommy! Where's my Mommy?!_

_I found more, over here!_

_Chinese filth! Leeching off of our motherland! Die!_

_Mommy, it hurts...it HURTS...._

Then she would start seeing the fire. She would see hazy forms running away, as if fleeing from some unseen threat. Something they found so terrifying that they were willing to push and trip over each other just to get a few precious inches away from it. Like antelope fleeing from a cheetah.

Then she would start seeing the huts, burning and collapsing into smoldering ashes. She would see weeping figures watching as their meager lives were put to the torch.

Then she would wake up.

"Fucking hell", she said as she clumsily climbed out of her bed. She woozily scratched at her sunken eyes, trying to get the bits of dust and grime as she made her way to her 'bathroom' (which was just a sink and a toilet on the far side of her room). She could hear her phone vibrating near the window, but it would have to wait.

She stumbled groggily over to the sink, and looked at herself in the mirror.

Yeah, she was still fucking ugly.

Her sunken eyes framed by pale green flesh, stretched thinnly over a face that was more a caricature of a skull then any actual skull. Her noseless face steepled over thin lips, barely stretched over bare rows of teeth. The whole ghastly ensemble was topped off with long back-length black hair. She was reminded of the stories the old Chinese lady would tell kids like her about the Hungry Ghosts, the poor souls of those who died with overpowering desire, and who wandered the underworld for eternity, desprately hungering for food, for drink, for carnal release, and never able to be sated.

And yes, she was hungry. Always hungry. Or thirsty. Or horny. Or some combination of all three. No matter how much she ate, or how much she drank, or how many sessions she had in the bedroom, it was never enough. She may have been sated temporarily, just enough that she could ignore it for a while, but it always came back. She had been down here for fifty years, and for all that time , always in the back of her mind and in the pit of her gut, she was  _ hungry _ .

This is what she lived with down here. This is how she woke up when she found herself here. Any previous good looks she may have had in life had been stripped away from her by cruel karma, the most severest of justice.

Well, at least it made brushing her teeth a bit easier....

As she squeezed out toothpaste on her ragged toothbrush, she turned on the faucet. Stale water poured forth. It tasted like shit, but it was relatively clean (at least by Imp City standards). And besides, what could it do? Kill her? That's a laugh.

She was starting breakfast and putting on her bra when her phone started vibrating again.

She looked at the caller's ID.

It was Lucius, her ILF contact.

"Yes, Lu?"

_ "I told you to stop forwarding your clients' calls to me",  _ Lucius growled angrily into her ear.

"And I told  _ you  _ that I might be able to stop doing that if you could get me a proper office."

_"And I told YOU that real-estate in this town is already fucking murder as it is! The bastards have us packed like sardines in this fucking hole!"_

"Funny. You managed to scrounge enough space for your training cells."

_"Yeah, after we gutted the owner and hanged the fucker from his entrails."_

Now that she thought about it, they  _ had  _ eviserated the warehouse's previous owner...and she was pretty sure the fat old imp was still hanging from some random lamp post, screaming to anyone who would listen. Most people ignored him. This was Hell. No one fucking cared.

"Is it really such a big distraction from your bomb-making, Lu?"

The other end went silent for a second. Then she heard Lu respond with a low growl.

_"I'm not your fucking secretary."_

"And you're not my fucking mother. Now what is it you need? I'm fixing to eat breakfast."

She heard Lucius sigh.

_"You've got another client asking for you. Wants to report a missing person."_

"Oh joy of joys. What else is new." She started combing her hair to wrench out the knots. The rice cooker was finished and her breakfast was ready. "I get enough of those as it is."

_"Uh huh, my heart bleeds. But you might want to pay attention to this one."_

"And why's that? Another minor lord missing their precious heiress? A servant ran out after impregnating the wife?"

_"This ain't small time, Chay. This is big leagues. We're talking more than a minor lord here. We're talking someone big."_

Chay started pouring her morning rice porridge into a bowl. She reached into the 'pantry' (a hole in the wall) and grabbed her containers of black pepper and crushed chilies.

"Mhmm. I'm sure."

She sprinkled the pepper and chilies over the porridge and took a bite.

_"I'm not fucking with you, Chay! Just get your ass down here quick. They want you there before three, and you're gonna want a good three or four hours to spare for the trip."_

Chay spat out the rice porridge.

"The FUCK are you talking about? Imp City is big but it ain't THAT fucking big!"

_"This job ain't here in Imp, Chay. You're dealing with the bigger fish this time. You're going out of town."_

Chay suddenly stopped breathing.

"...Out of town? What lunatic would try to leave the city?! The wasteland is a goddamn gauntlet of nightmares!"

She heard Lucius sigh (again).

_"We've got a way to get you to P.C., Chay. Don't worry. But you're gonna need to work out some details over here before you leave._

Wait....did he say P.C.?

"Lucius....don't fuck with me here. By P.C. do you means...."

_"Yeah. I'm talking about Pentagram City. You're going to see one of the Overlords."_

* * *

"She's clean! Let her in!", the Imp guard cried into the warehouse.

Chay winced as the enormous warehouse doors screeched open. She was often surprised by the stupidity of some of Lucius's men. She had been down here numerous times before, and honestly who else in this cursed urbania looked like a six foot ghoul wearing all-black with a checkered red-and-white scarf?

_ Now that I think about it _ , she thought,  _ probably more than a few _ .

She stepped inside as the doors screeched shut behind her. The lights flickered back on as the backups restored the power. The warehouse suddenly became a flurry of activity again, with the giant metal printing press printing out propaganda and the new recruits going through their drills. She could see some of Lucius's crew polishing machine guns at a ramshackle table near the back. And above all of it was a large black banner hanging from the rafters, emblazoned with a red pentagram bearing the letters I.L.F in black, and wreathed by a pair of Imp horn: The flag of the Imp Liberation Front.

As usual, they had decided to go dark as soon as they heard someone was outside. Also as usual, they immediately turned the lights back on as soon as they realized she was no threat.

Over-conifdent and inefficent. That was the ILF to a tee.

"Chay! Over here!".

Lucius was standing near the door to the warehouse's underground shelter. Lucius was fairly tall for an Imp, standing at around 4 ft. He was clad as usual in his black sweater, cargo shorts and a pair of dark sunglasses, topped off with a black beret. His white hair was shaved into a pair of sideburns, and the white spaces in his Imp horns had been dyed pitch black.

"Lucius, you better start explaining to me what the fuck you're planning". Chay was unusually grumpy this morning, and the fact that her 'business partner' was laying the secrecy on thick was only making it worse. Normally Lucius was pretty forthcoming when it came to these jobs. He had to be. The whole deal he had made with Chay in the first place was that he would help with her detective business as long as she helped fund his organization. In return, Chay had the official protection of the ILF guerillas and their associates, and Chay was able to navigate the hazardous web of connections and double-crosses that made up Hell's social system. The fact that Lucius had been otherwise faithful on his end of the bargain all of this time was testament to the lucrative nature of their partnership.

At least, that's what she kept telling herself. Imps were quite a bit more agreeable than your average Sinner in Hell, but they were more than capable of stabbing you in the back.

"Chay, I'm sorry about the bullshit", Lucius said. "But I promise there is a reason for all of the cloak n' dagger crap. I told you that we weren't dealing with a minor lord here, and I meant it. We're talking about someone much  _ much  _ bigger."

Chay grabbed Lucius by his collar.

"I don't want your excuses, Lu. I want  _ answers _ . Why are you making me get out of bed before noon? Who the fuck is this person? Why the fuck are they so goddamn special? And  _ why _ are you acting like Mr. Special has you by the balls?!"

Lucius threw up his hands incredulously. "Because this person is calling in a big fucking favor, and you're the only person I know of who can do the job. This guy could help fund our operations for the forseeable  _ century _ ....."

Lucius went quiet for a second.

"...And he's really not the type who accepts failure as an option".

Chay was staring daggers into Lucius's shades.

"Lu. Answers.  _ Now _ ."

"Oh, fuck it.", Lucius growled. He fished into his pockets and pulled out his phone. He shoved it into Chay's face.

"Fucking read it yourself. But just so we're clear: I was TRYING to prepare you for..."

Lucius's voice faded out. Chay couldn't hear him anymore. At best all she could hear was a dull roar.

Because the message that was blinking at her on Lucius's phone nearly killed her a second time.

:LU, BABY.

YOUR FAVOR HAS BEEN CALLED.

SEND YOU PEEP TO ME.

4PM SHARP.

DON'T KEEP A BITCH WAITING.

\- VAL ♥ :


	2. Mistakes have been made...

"...Fucking Valentino?!". Chay was nearly apopleptic. This was nowhere near standard proceedure (or anywhere close to the running joke they amusingly called 'standard proceedure'). Lu had been right: this wasn't some regular minor lord. This wasn't even a  _ major  _ lord. This was one of the fucking  _ Overlords _ . This was one of the demons that stood on the top rungs of Hell's social ladder. One of the demons that not only ran Hell, but also had substantial control over one of Hell's most lucrative businesses. 

But of all the Overlords that Lucius could have gotten mixed up with, why did it have to be...

"... _ FUCKING VALENTINO _ ?!", Chay shouted for a second time (and slightly louder).

"Yes, Chay. We know his name.", Lucius said as they descended the long staircase into the underground bunker. "We are aware of it. You don't have to keep screaming it into my ear."

Chay was shaking her head. "But....but VALENTINO?! The king shit of Pimp Mountain?! The guy who controls all of Hell's sex industry? You made a deal with THAT asshole?!"

"Yes, Chay", Lucius sighed. "I did. Connections are important to the cause."

Chay grabbed Lucius by the shoulders, shaking her head. "But....but  _ WHY _ ?!"

Chay just couldn't believe it. Why would Lucius connect himself with someone like Val? Val wasn't just the the sex industry's head, he was also a flesh trader. A  _ prolific _ flesh trader. And Imps were among his most lucrative merchandise. Imps were indigenous to Hell, and Valentino's customers relished in the idea of exploiting and hurting someone with the 'innocence' (in a manner of speaking) of someone who was not a Sinner.

Lucius put his hands up defensively. "It's not like that Chay, honest!". He pressed his fingers to his forehead, trying to fight off a migraine. "Look, do you remember a few months ago during the Hecate struggle?"

".....Yes, I do happen to remember it.", Chay acknowledged. Hecate was the name of an independent brothel in Imp city's lower West side. The guy who ran it (a Sinner by the name of Flynn) had been accused of kidnapping drug-addicted Imps off of the street in order to work for him, and he kept them there through a combination of threats and a fresh supply of hard drugs. Lucius and the ILF obviously couldn't tolerate such a blatant example of Imp exploitation, so one of their female members attempted to go in undercover as an Imp hooker, trying to sneak a pipebomb into the place. The pipebomb had been loaded with shrapnel made from the spears that the Exterminators used during the annual Cleansing.

"Yeah, and do you remember how that ended?", Lucius asked.

What  _ had  _ happened was that the Imp girl not only managed to blow herself up, but she also managed to take out Flynn himself and several of his patrons. She ALSO managed to take out some of the Imp prostitutes, which ultimately defeated the entire purpose of the action.

"OK, yes I do remember. But what does  _ that  _ have to do with Valentino?"

Lucius shook his head. "One of the girls the bomb killed wasn't just another Imp. She was also an informant working for Valentino." Lucius rubbed the bridge of his nose. "Having Val's goons inform me was....not plesant."

Some gears clicked in Chay's head. Valentino must have figured out what had happened. Which meant that he had leverage that he could exploit.

"......Son of a bitch, he really  _ does  _ have you by the balls."

Lucius nodded. "Like a vice grip." He turned around and began descending the staircase again.

"But if that's the case...", Chay wonderd as she followed after him, "then why hasn't he come after you until now?"

"Well, according to  _ him _ , we managed to inadvertedly help him. We took out a potential competitor, and also tied up a potential loose end."

Chay blinked. "Wow.....he's a cold bastard."

"Very.", Lucius agreed. He took out a small skeleton key and began unlocking a vaulted door at the bottom of the stair-well. The heavy door slowly opened, revealing a cramped space filled with emergency supplies (in the event of either an Extermination or other unconceived-of catastrophe). This was the bunker that had been built decades ago by the previous owner. At the other end of the bunker was yet another door.

Lucius jogged over to the other side of bunker. "Alright, this is where we part ways for now." He pulled out a key card and ran it through a dusty cardreader on the door. The cardreader acknowledged Lucius's input and the door slowly swung open on rusty hinges. "My comrade Viola is waiting for you below. She'll be the one to get you set up before you leave." He pocketed his keycard and crossed his arms. "After that, you're on your own."

Chay looked through the door...to yet another descending staircase. There was  _ definitely  _ a metaphor somewhere in this. 

Lucius handed her a flashlight. "At the bottom of this is your ride. You remember the old Tube system?"

Chay blinked for a second.

"You mean the old subway?"

Lucius shook his head. "Not a subway. A literal Tube system. Lucifer tore up half of Hell a few decades ago because he wanted to create a convenient form of travel. He came up with the idea of enormous pneumatic tubes that could get someone from one city to another in a matter of hours. His idea of rapid transit." Lucius sighed and shook his head. "....But he forgot to factor in what kind of impact those kinds of g-forces have on lower demons."

Chay looked back through the door.

"Wait....you mean I'm going to be traveling in  _ that _ ?"

"Yeah, sort of. Except you'll be going in a hermetically sealed capsule rather than the old glass pods that were originally used. You'll come out of it fine. Mostly."

Lucius began walking back to the vaulted door. "Alright, clock's ticking. Viola will meet you at the bottom and get you strapped in." He walked through the door's frame and looked back at her. "My advice to you? Keep your eyes closed. Don't want to lose your breakfast."

Lucius grinned. "Good luck!", he waved and slammed the vaulted door shut.

Chay shook her head. "Fucking Hell." She flipped on the flashlight and began descending the staircase. She braced herself against the wall as she tenously took step after step. It was very obvious that this place hadn't seen any action in decades. She could see cracked tiles, dripping pipes, and she was pretty sure she could hear things  _ slithering  _ behind the walls. Hell was already pretty dangerous as it was, but Hell in the dark was a different kind of hazordous altogether. 

She finally descended the final step and found herself in a large, dark atrium. She could see cracked Roman-style columns and a series of what she presumed to have been benches, though the wood used for their construction had since rotted through and collapsed in on themselves. One of the colums had long since collapsed, and underneath it was the skeleton of a dead Sinner, gripping a rusted red crowbar. The poor bastard must have been trapped here for a some time...at least until one of the Exterminators got to him.

"Look's like shit huh?"

Chay almost jumped out of her skin. She wheeled around behind her, trying to find the source of the voice, nearly tripping on her own scarf.

"Over here, dipshit."

A second flashlight flicked on in front of her, illuminating the face of a heavily mascara'd Imp.

"Name's Viola. Nice to fucking meet you."

Chay shined her light towards the source of the voice, revealing a squat female Imp. She was wearing a black turtle-neck sweater, beret and cargo skirt. Her face was one of annoyance....or indifference. Resting bitch face, maybe?

"Ahem, yes. Nice to mee you to." She put her hand forward. "I'm Chay Ong, Private Investigator."

"Lucius's new dupe, in other words." Viola returned the handshake. She swung her flashlight widely across the atrium, illuminating it's gilded ruin. "So much work done for such a stupid whim." She then pointed the flashlight up to the ceiling. "And it's all because of that guy."

Chay looked up at where Viola's flashlight was pointing.

"Whoa", she said.

The ceiling had been painted with a massive mural. It was cracked and the paint had chipped in a few places, but there was no mistaking it's subject: A blond-haired demon, wearing a white overcoat, white wide-brimmed hat, white trousers, shiny black shoes, a red-striped shirt, and wielding a cane topped with a red apple...and centered by a bright-white face with purple eye-shadow, rosy cheeks and a grin full of white, pointed teeth.

The Morningstar himself: Lucifer Magne.

"Guess he didn't want anyone to forget who built it.", Chay remarked.

"And yet, everyone did. Fifty years after it's failure and now noone remembers this thing. Follow me, please." Viola turned around and jogged over to the other side of the atrium, with Chay catching up behind her.

"Did Lucius already give you the details?", Viola asked.

"As much as I think he was willing to give.", Chay answered. "Something about how he owes Val a favor for the botched Hecate job."

"You mean what happened to Layla?" Viola got quiet. " It wasn't her fault, you know. Our bombmaker had fucked with the timer. She was supposed to have been out of that place for half and hour before it was supposed to blow."

"You knew her?", Chay asked.

"A little bit. She was a true comrade." Viola actually seemed whistful. "I kind of wished I'd known her better."

"Well, either way...", Chay said as he tried to keep up with Viola, "It turned out that one of the brothel's workers was an informant for Valentino, and Val's goons let him know."

Viola halted. She turned to face Chay. "Is  _ that  _ what he told you?"

Chay narrowed her eyes. "Yes, that's the info he relayed to me."

Viola's face puckered. She could barely contain her laughter.

"And you  _ believe  _ him? Seriously?"

Chay sighed and facepalmed. "I knew there had to be more to the story."

Viola shook her head as she wiped away tears of laughter. "Oh honey, that's most of it. There's just one crucial detail he left out."

Chay crossed her arms. "And that would be?"

"oh come  _ on _ !", Viola turned back around and wandered over to the edge of the atrium. "You've known Lucius for  _ how long _ , now? You know he likes to get his dick wet as much as anybody!"

Chay grunted. She  _ did  _ know about that. The nature of her afterlife meant that she had found herself with Lucius in situations she'd much rather forget. Situations of a  _ carnal  _ nature, and ones she wasn't exactly pround of.

"Meaning...?", Chay asked.

" _ Meaning  _ that he was dating the girl who turned out to be Val's mole! She  _ told  _ him she was working for Val! How do you think he found out in the first place?"

Chay sighed. Of  _ course  _ that was it. Valentino must have tracked him down after the Hecate went up in flames.

"So then the reason Val is holding this over Lu's head...."

"...Is because Val has some serious  _ compramat  _ on Lu.", Viola finished for her. "The only way Lu found out about Hecate at all was because he was patronizing it to begin with."

Chay was....not necessarily mad, as much as she was disappointed. She knew that Lucius was a horn dog, but she also thought he had  _ some  _ principles. 

She was about to ask if Lucius had any other potential blackmailers when Viola pointed in front of her. "We're here".

Chay shined her flashlight where Viola was pointing. It was an enormous metal tube, extending from one end of the atrium to the other, and lined with a series of metal hatches. It was rusted in places, and some of the welding bolts were definitely not as secure as they could have been.

Viola reached up and undid the latch on the center hatch. It slowly popped open.

Chay looked inside the tube. Inside was a large obsidian capsule, roughly about the average size of an Imp (about 4 ft.). The words 'Imp Launcher" were painted on it's side in white.

"You see the capsule, right?", Viola asked. She was a little too short to look into the hatch herself.

Chay nodded. It looked kind of cramped.

"Ok, you're going to need a door code to get inside." Viola pulled out a small notepad from her skirt pocket. "Look towards the back of the capsule. See the keypad?"

Chay pointed her flashlight towards the rear of the capsule. There was a small numerical keypad...of only six numbers.

Because  _ of course _ it was. Lucifer was fucking obsessed with that number for some reason.

"Yeah, I see it."

"Alright, enter the following...". Viola cleared her throat. "Six and one..."

"...Got it." Chay pressed the appropriate keys, which responded with an affirmative click.

"...Five......five, two, five, two......"

Chay stopped for a moment. "Is there a reason you're reading these so.....I don't know,  _ haltingly _ ?"

"Hey, it's Lu's handwriting!", Viola grunted. "Three....and one. That should do it."

The door of the capsule hissed open.

"Alright, get in. I know it's a bit cramped, but it's the best bet we have."

Chay cautiously climbed inside. The interior of the capusle was padded with black leather, and a small viewing window was centered at eye-level (for an Imp, anyway).

"Hey, where did you guys get this thing? This is pretty ritzy for a ruined transport system."

Viola replaced the noteback and reached into her pocket again. "It was hidden in the bunker. Now take this, you're gonna need a weapon. Pentagram City isn't very safe on it's best day..."

Viola pulled out a pistol....or at least that's what Chay thought it was. It was certainly pistol  _ like _ , at least.

"What's this?"

"This is Lu's gift to you." Viola handed the weapon to Chay. "It's called an Apache Revolver. It was used by old French gangsters in the 1900s."

The weapon certainly looked a little haphazard. It was definitely a revolver, but it looked like it was constructed out of random junk. The handle was a knuckle duster, and the trigger had no trigger guard. The barrel was short and blunt, with what looked like a small folding dagger blade screwed to the side. The only normal part of the gun was the cylinder, which was loaded with six shots.

"It's three weapons in one. Good for punching, stabbing, and plugging." Viola also handed Chay a small map. "This is a map of the West side, where you're going. It's where Pentagram City's red light district is located....I mean, in a matter of speaking. That whole city is basically one giant sin haven".

Chay curled up in her cramped vehicle. "Hey, Lu said something about g-forces?"

"Yeah, don't worry about those. You're well fortified inside there." Viola smooted out her skirt. "OK, I've done my part of the job. The trip should take you about four hours, tops. It's gonna be a bumpy ride, so get comfy."

Chay shifted around, trying to find a comfortable position. "Well, I'll try to endure it I guess." The door to the capsule hissed shut. She could see the hazy form of Viola through the door's tinted window.

"Story of our lives, Chay." Viola began shutting the hatch. "Alright, time to go." Viola hit a large red button labeled 'LAUNCH'. The Tube's mechanism began charging up. Chay could feel the capsule's interior vibrating. "Let's just hope the rest of the Tube hasn't completely collapsed..."

"Wait...what did you say about...."

"Good luck!" Viola slammed the hatch shut.

Chay sighed. "Goddammit."

The mechanism launched. Chay felt like she had been fired out of a cannon. She could feel her teeth rattling as strong g-forces fulled her backward. Her hair was matted against her scalp as she was pushed into the capsule's leather interior.

She was on her way to Pentagram City.

She was out cold by the ten minute mark.


	3. Keeping Appointments

_"We can no longer tolerate your counter-revolutionary thought!"_

_"But I have served the cause faithfully! I have done everything for my country!"_

_The bodies burned everywhere around her. The screams of the dying echoed through the jungle._

_"The line has shifted. To keep you is no longer profit."_

_She shook her head miserably._

_"I do not understand, what is happening to..."_

_There is a loud crack._

_The huts around her burned to the ground...._

"GOD FUCKING DAMMIT!", Chay shouted into the void.

Her head bounced off of the capsule's roof. The leather cushioning barely kept her skull from rattling.

She experimentally moved her various fingers and joints. All accounted for. Her arms and legs seemed to also still be intact.

There did seem to be this weird ringing in her ears, but that was already fading.

She fumbled around her knees, trying to find her pockets. She pulled out her phone and brought it up to her face. The time said 3:10 PM.

It looked like she would be on time, at the very least. Now she needed to actually get out of this damn thing.

She turned on the phone's flashlight function, searching for a way out. She was hoping that she wouldn't have to literally claw her way out of this thing. Or worse, be trapped in this hermetically sealed tomb for all eternity. Fortunately for her, she found a small red button labeled 'open' right above her knee.

She pressed the button as hard as she could. She  _ really  _ wanted to get out of this fucking thing.

The door slowly slid open...and she was hit in the face with a wave of dust and debris. And a smell. A very  _ foul  _ smell. Like sewage.

It  _ was  _ sewage. The capsule's trajectory must have ended in the city's sewer.

Chay slowly unfolded her limbs, which were numb and prickling as her nerves re-awakened. She poked her head out of the capsule and looked at her surroundings. Yep, it was Pentagram City's sewer system. The floodlights above her head made that very obvious.

She stumbled out of the capsule...and immediately felt the ground give way beneath her as she face-planted into slimy concrete.

She didn't even cry out or act surprised. She almost  _ expected  _ to fall into shit.

She braced her hands against the wall as she slowly got up, her feet slipping slightly on the wet ground beneath her.

She looked up above her head, and found the capsule she had just tumbled out of.

It was ten feet in the air, lodged into a sewer wall. She could see water trickling from where the capsule had impacted. This part of the Tube system in Pentagram City must have crossed over with the city's sewers, or maybe had been integrated into it some time ago.

She looked down at her phone. Fortunately, it hadn't cracked from the fall. She felt around her pockets, checking to see if her other meager possesions were still with her.

Revolver, wallet, gloves, keys to her flat....all accounted for.

The flashlight that Lucius had given her, unfortunately, was no longer functioning. Her phone would serve as an adequate replacement...as long as the battery lasted.

Which reminded her: She still needed to get to the surface. She swore she could see things slithering around in the sewage, hastily gobbling up any nutrition they could get from the sewage water's contents.

She looked around for an exit. The only one she could see was a ladder that led up to a sewer grate. The red glow of Hell's afternoon flickered between its bars.

She reached into her coat for her gloves and slid them on. She  _ really  _ did not want to touch anything in this place if she didn't have to.

She braced herself against the ladder, and started to climb.

  
  


* * *

Crol looked up at the tall ghoul.

"You have any miso?", she asked.

He fumbled around the pots on his soup cart. The girl had suddenly appeared out of nowhere, as if rising directly out of the pavement. One minute the squat green kobold-demon was rolling down 66th street towards the weed den getting ready for the munchy rush, and then suddenly this chick sprouted out of the ground, smelling like she'd taken a dip in sewer water.

He ladeled out a bowl of miso and tofu soup and handed it to her. She was clad all in black, wearing gloves, and had a checkered scarf wrapped around her face. The only thing he could see were a pair of yellow eyes, looking at him like she wanted to be anywhere else.

She handed him cash in return.

"One more thing." She stirred the bowl with her plastic spoon. "Which part of the Pentagram is this place?"

".....You a recent arrival?", Crol asked her quizzically.

"In a manner of speaking.", she replied gruffly. "Now which part? I'm on the clock here."

Crol rubbed his chin.  _ Hmmm...maybe I can get something out of this after all. _

The ghoul kept stirring her soup. Crol had an easy mark.

"Well, I  _ could  _ tell you...", he said slyly. "But what are you going to do for..."

He stopped talking when he saw the gun in his face.

"I'm in no mood. Now  _ tell me _ ." She grumbled.

"The west side! You're on the west side, I swear!", he cried. The little green Sinner trembled.

She re-holstered the pistol. Crol sighed in relief. He wasn't looking to have to deal with a bullet wound today.

She gruffly nodded and pulled out a city map from her coat and unfolded it.

"And this street is.....?"

"Sixty sixth!", Crol replied quickly. This bitch was  _ nuts _ .

"Mhmm....so the studio is  _ this  _ way....". She strolled away from him, spooning soup into what he guessed was her mouth.

Not even a 'Thank You'.

"The fuck is Hell coming to?", he asked himself.

It started to rain.

  
  


  
  


* * *

Chay hucked the empy soup bowl into a nearby garbage can. She dabbed the sides of her mouth with her scarf as she ducked out from underneath the awning she was using to hide from the rain. The sky was beginning to clear up.

That sudden rainstorm had come on quite unexpectedly. She'd heard that the weather in Pentagram City could be unusually unpredictable. She thought that maybe it had something to do with all of the Overlords being collected in one general area (including the royal family). Having that amount of power swirling around each other must have done crazy shit to the city's eco-system. Quite appropriate, if you thought about it. Hell itself was always in flux, with entire areas ripping themselves out of the ground and then re-settling in other places, sometimes hundreds of miles away.

Chay unwrapped her scarf from around her face and tied it around her neck. It was getting a bit humid after the rainstorm. The air was getting thick and the streets were getting steamy.

Well, at least she wouldn't stick of sewage anymore.

She looked down the street. She could see a number of tall buildings in the distance. She needed to get a better look. There was a decrepit apartment building nearby. Maybe they had a fire escape...

As she rounded the corner into the nearby alley, she saw a series of posters hastily glued to a wall, along with a bunch of random graffiti. They were all frayed and faded, and had obviously been there for sometime.

One was a simple image of a rainbow, with words emblazoned in large black font:  _ COMING SOON, THE HAPPY HOTEL! Register NOW!  _ It was barely legible underneath the graffiti sprayed over it: a single grinning eye with an x in the middle, the phrase "Always Chasing Rainbows", an ouroboros with the Big Dipper in the center, and a crudely drawn Imp with an enormous penis.

Chay tried to jog her memory. The 'Happy Hotel'. She remembered hearing about such an establishment, shortly after the end of the most recent Cleansing. It was some kind of public housing effort supported by a member of the royal family (she wanted to say either the Queen or her daughter). The opening had apprently been less than spectacular, and had largely been overshadowed by the turf war that had broken out around the same time. Of course, that was months ago, so perhaps there had been time for turnaround?

But it was the second poster that really got her attention.

It showed what appeared to be a large circus tent, engulfed in flames, with numerous demonic and misshapen figures either burning in the inferno, or fleeing in terror. Extending from the top of the Big Top was a jacketed figure with enormous deer antlers, a pair of blank voids that suggested eyes...and an enormous, toothy and sinister smile.

The image was stark and terrifying, yet masterful in composition.

And around the image were the words scratched out in some maddened hand:  _ BEWARE !!!!!! HIM!! THE RADIO DEMON!! _

She had heard people tell stories of encounters with this individual...ones that had been fortunate enough to survive, that is. Some charming, grinning psychopath who could bend space and time to his every whim. The less she thought about him, the better.

Next to the two posters was a fire escape ladder, already lowered (or already broken, anyway). It led up a few stories to the top of the building, offering an adequate view of the cityscape.

She steadied herself on the first rung. The ladder was rusty, but appeared to still be solid. She tentavily climbed up to the next rung. And then another. And then yet another. Eventually, against everything that could go wrong, she reached the top rung and scrambled onto the roof.

She looked out in the distance. Amidst the haphazard forest of skyscrapers and underneath the white pentagram in the sky, she could see a building painted in gaudy velvet and silver. The enormous likeness of a red demoness hung off the side of it, dressed in fish-nets and a black dress, and her tail illuminated with LED lights. On top of the building were the words  _ PORN STUDIOS _ , also illuminated with a large pair of red lips in a permanat O-face in the center.

There was her destination.

She checked her phone. It said 3:45 PM.

She had roughly fifteen minutes to make her appointment.

She was going to have to take the short cut...

Chay wrapped her scarf tightly around her neck.

She squared her footing.

And then she jumped to the nextdoor roof.

  
  


  
  


* * *

She had expected some kind of tacky guilded door, ringed with perverse sculptures and torches.

Instead, she got an unassuming automatic sliding door. One that actually had a crack in one of the panes of glass. There was something leaking out from underneath it. Something red and with the consistency of red rum punch. She gingerly stepped over it as she entered the building.

She had expected some grotesque sculptures of muscular demons urinating in a fountain, and big-breasted harlots cavorting with every imaginable Hell-dwelling being.

_ That _ , she ended getting right. Right down to the last detail.

In fact, the very first thing that once encountered when entering the interior of Porn Studios was an enormous golden statue, featuring a tall insectoid demon wearing heart-shaped glasses, a tall hat with a striped band, a fur coat dotted with hearts, and several unidentifiable demons of various genders lustily pawing at his groin.

She figured as much. Valentino must have had a massive ego, if not also being extremely insecure.

Then there was the smell. A sickly sweet cinnamon that tried to cover up the scent of sweat and bodily fluids. Like someone trying to spray air freshener in a whorehouse.

"Mrs. Ong? Is that you?"

The receptionist behind the desk was a male demon, a cyclopic squid with a pair of tentacles for arms and wearign a pink coat and black tie. He had a headpiece plugged into his ear and thumbing through papers on a clipboard.

Chay nodded. "Yes, that's me. I believe I'm on time?"

As she got closer, she could see that the guy was sweating heavily, with obvious sweat stains forming underneath his 'arms'. He fiddled with his earpiece as he thumbed through more papers.

"Yes ma'am, you are on time. Barely."

He sighed a bit, as if he had just unloaded an enormous weight from his shoulders.

"My boss has been asking about you incessantly for the last half hour. He usually expects his potential employers to be here thirty minuts in advance."

Chay grumbled underneath her breath.

"What was that, ma'am?"

"...Nothing. Let's just get this over with."

"Very good. Follow me if you will..."

Chay padded behind the receptionist up a pair of spiral stairs and through a pair of elevator doors (which she found completely unnecessary and ass-backwards, but this was Valentino's place). The elevator's interior was carpeted with faux-furs and velvet lining. No muzak to tolerate, at least. Thank karma for small fortunes.

"Now Ms. Ong, if I may briefly have your attention...."

Chay glared at him. "Yes?"

"Ahem, quite. Now, Ms. Ong, your services came highly reccomended from my boss's associates, so he expects a certain degree of decorum, if you will. Please only speak when spoken to, and remember to refer to him as 'Sir'. Mr Valentino is used to respect from his potential employees, and he is already in a bit of a foul mood as it is."

The elevator doors dinged open. Chay followed him down a velvet hallway, lined with doors and encased posters with such titles as "Rapacious Imps" and "Lizard Lusts for Armpits". From behind the doors she could hear wet slapping sounds, cries of passion...and a few terrified screams.

"Remember to be courteous," he continued. "If Mr. Valentino offers you anything to eat or drink, please accept it. He does not like to be snubbed for his generosity".

_ Pretty sure he drugged most of it already _ , she thought to herself. 

"Ah, we're here."

They stopped in front of an enormous door that was covered in flashing LED lights. The patterns they showed constantly shifted and changed: First there was a pair of breasts, then a penis, then a penis entering some orifice or other, and then flashing hearts. Above the door was emblazoned the words:  **VALENTINO, PRESIDENT & CEO** .

The receptionist spoke into his earpiece and nodded.

"Yes, they are ready for you now. Mr. Valentino awaits you on the other side of these doors."

Chay took a steady breath. The cinnamon smell was getting stronger...and she could feel her skin crawling.

"I shall await you at the end of your appointment. Do  _ not  _ disappoint my boss."

The receptionist turned and walked back to the elevator. The doors slid shut in front of him.

She was alone. Nothing between her and one of Hell's most powerful figures except for this light-studded door.

The doors began to creak open.


	4. Meeting an Overlord

At this point the smell was so strong that her eyes were beginning to water...and when your eyes were as sunken in as hers were, that could be a problem.

There was something else to....something that both excited and aroused her, and yet screamed at her to run away, to flee, to jump out of the _window_ if she had to...

And the object of that feeling -the one _causing_ it- was sitting right in front of her.

Valentino was as imposing in person as was his sculpture in the lobby. He was an insectoid demon, a moth. He was _enormous_ , at least twelve feet tall. His sinister eyes were hidden behind his heart-shaped glasses, and he held an enormous goblet of wine that he casually guzzled from. He was seated on a golden, diamond-studded throne. Waiting beside him were a number of handlers and servants, all of them of various sizes and genders, and all completely nude. He pawed a young Imp woman's bust as she licked the side of his mouth, where some red blood-like substance was oozing from behind his teeth (one of which was gold).

( _Well, that answers what the leak at the door was_ , she thought to herself)

Then he turned to look at Chay.

She suddenly felt naked and vulnerable.

"Chay, baby. You're finally here."

She felt dizzy, like the room was twisting and warping around her.

She tried to steady herself. "Yes sir, that's me. I am Chay Ong, Private Investig-"

"I already know who you are, babe." He stood up from his throne and walked across the room towards her. "I wouldn't have asked for you otherwise." His every step set off an echo that pounded in her ears.

He stopped in front of her and leaned over to meet her gaze. He eyed her up and down, drinking in every bit of her appearnce. She wasn't sure if he was looking for some hidden threat, or undressing her with his eyes. His breath stank of sour wine and cologne.

"You do come highly recommended. One of my business partners even asked for you by name when I....called in his favor."

His voice oozed sex and menace. Even the sewer water didn't make her feel this unclean.

"Hmmm.....you seem a little tense, dear." He lowered one of his enormous gloved hands onto her shoulders. "You should relax. I promise I won't bite."

Chay cleared her throat. "Ahem. I apologize for imposing sir, but I would like to know about this job you're asking me to do."

"All business, huh?", he replied. "Heh, I kinda like that. Straight to the point it is, then."

Valentino sat back down on his throne and sipped from his goblet. "So I am sure your associate has already given you the info on the...debt that he owes me? I would certainly hope that he's at least _that_ competent."

"Yes, sir. He informed me of the...arrangement you have made with his organization. He is indebted to your generosity and has put me at your disposal."

_Good. Try and be as professional as possible. Don't let him think you're absolutely terrified of him._

"You mean how he stuck his dick in my property and then wasted her?"

Okay...that kind of threw her for a loop.

"Yes sir...I suppose that is the summary of it."

" _Summary_ , huh? Oh no, darlin'. There's a lot more to it that just _that_ . That little cocksucker you call a 'partner' not only used and destroyed some of my merchandise, he also took away a very valuable information source _!!_ I've lost both profits _and_ dirt because of your pal!"

Chay wanted to shrink into the floor. Him shouting at her made her want to claw her way through the shag carpeting and into the basement, no matter how many floors she would have to dig through.

Valentino sighed deeply and sipped from his goblet. "However...your little friend did inadvertedly aid me in my business. I _do_ have one less competitor because of him. That is worth something to me."

Valentino took another sip...and came up empty. He threw his goblet at a nearby handler, hitting her right in the face.

"Daddy needs a refill, bitches!", he cried.

One of the other handlers, a squat green lizard, climbed up onto the arm of his throne and whispered into Valentino's ear.

"Mmm, fantastic. It's prepared then."

Valentino wiped his mouth with the sleeve of his furcoat. "Fine then, the task I have prepared for you..."

The lizard walked over to Chay and handed her two photographs. One was a photo of a female Sinner, a felinoid-demon with striped cherry-blonde hair, curled whiskers and zebra stripes all over her well-endowed curves. The other photo was of a male Sinner, a foppish male green snake-demon wearing faux-military get-up, with a thorny rose on his lapel and a raven's feather lodged into an officer's cap.

"The gentleman you see playing soldier there is Profera, one of my procurers. Three weeks ago I sent him out on a tip we had received about some potential competition. We have not heard anything from him since, and any information he may have obtained disppeared with him."

Chay nodded. "You think he might have betrayed you?"

Valentino scratched his jaw. "That is a possibilty that I have considered. However, Profera has worked for me for several decades. He has never gone back on our arrangement, and he _knows_ what I would do if he _stabbed me in the back_."

Chay looked at the other photograph. "I assume the woman is..."

"Merchandise, yes. A recent acquisition."

Chay eyed the picture. She couldn't see any bruises or track marks on her, so 'recent' must have meant _very_ recent.

"She disappeared shortly after Profera. She was due for a photo-shoot and then bailed on us. Lost me money and fucked the schedule in the process. One of my employees brought it to my attention." He visibly tensed, as if he wanted to bite the air. "He claims that she was snatched off of the street during her shift. I do _not_ tolerate anyone stealing my property."

Valentino's eyes narrowed behind his shades. "I've lost enough property already to that clown-faced cunt and her fucking hotel. I do _not_ intend on losing any more if I can do something about it."

The room filled with venomous menace.

"You want me to find them, then?", Chay asked.

"They are a means to an end, babe." Valentino stood up from his throne. "No, your task is a bit more complicated than that. This is as much a job of identification as it is retrieval."

Valentino reached into his furcoat and produced a long, thin cigarette. He bent down as one of the handlers struck a match and lit it for him.

"Thanks, gorg." He smacked the handler on her ass as she walked away.

"Those two are your leads. Your job is to track down their whereabouts, and find out who or what is the source of their disappearance. My personal hunch is that it's another person trying to poke in on my territory."

Chay pocketed the photos. "What am I to do then?"

Valentino snapped his fingers. One of the handlers emerged with a small golden case. She opened the case to reveal a bullet.

"That is a 7mm jacketed hollowpoint bullet. Do you see the tip?"

Chay picked up the bullet and looked at it closely.

"...It's the same material used by the Exterminators.", Chay replied.

"Expensive as fuck, but yes. That is what it is."

So this wasn't just going to be a missing persons case.

"You want me to use this on whoever is responsible?", she asked.

"If it is something that can infact be shot, then yes." Valentino sat back down. The female handler from before returned with his goblet, now refilled. "It's already the perfect calibre for your revolver."

_Wait...._

"How did you..." She fished around in her pockets. The gun was gone.

"Don't worry. My associate at the front desk has your gun. You didn't think I'd let you in here with it, did you?"

Chay grumbled as she pocketed the bullet. She hoped he didn't hear it.

"What was that, babe?"

...He heard.

"Mr. Valentino, sir...you should know that I generally am not in the business of assassination."

Valentino jumped out of his seat and grabbed her by the throat. He lifted her completely off off the floor and to eye level, leaving Chay to dangle six feet off of the ground.

"And _I_ am not usually in the business of having to kowtow to a fucking _Imp_ into searching for _my_ property! You and all of those little red ass-munchers at the ILF still walk around _only_ because I haven't decided to cut off your fucking legs!" His angry gaze bore a hole into her skull.

"OK, fine! I get it!". She shouted as red wine-flecked spittle angrily sprayed her in the face.

Valentino let go. Chay dropped back down to the floor, rubbing her neck beneath her scarf.

"Good. Very good." He walked over to a nearby window, peering out at the ruddy glow falling over Pentagram City. Like nothing had happened. "Don't worry, darlin'. You'll be handsomely compensated, I assure you."

The lizard handler walked over to her with a briefcase. He opened it up and...

_Whoa._

That was a lot of money. A _lot_.

"But what do you want me to do if I find...well...?"

"Profera is a loose end. ", he replied. "If you can convince him to come back, then that will be the end of it. If not....well, simply inform me on his location." Valentino's grin stretched up to his ears. "I'll handle it from there."

"And the girl...?"

"Yes....the merchandise. If she is still alive and usable, then return her to me. If not...." Valentino shrugged his shoulders. "Her loyalty is all I care about."

"You don't seem to want her back that badly...."

"She's one of many, babe. I lost a lot of merchandise after the last Cleansing." Valentino giggled under his breath. "But this is Hell. I can get plenty more."

Chay eyed the cash. It was enough for a proper office. A proper office _building_. And plenty to spare.

Chay looked up at Valentino and nodded.

"I'll take the job."

"Very good! I knew you wouldn't let me down!"

The lizard slammed the briefcase shut with a loud snap.

"I mentioned that one of my employees was the one who brought this to my attention. He will be the one to give you further information. He'll meet you just outside the building."

"Is he to be trusted, sir?"

"Considering that he was the one who incessantly pestered me about it for the last week...yes, I believe he is quite trustworthy." Valentino returned to his seat and grabbed his goblet. "I wish you luck in your search, Ms. Ong."

The door behind her began to creak open again. The receptionist was waiting on the other side. Chay slowly strolled through the doors, ready to quit this suffocating vice den.

"Oh, and Mrs. Ong?"

Chay turned around.

"I am risking _a lot_ by hiring an outside contractor here. I am, against my better judgement, paying an unknown asset to carry out a job for me, in return for sparing someone I should have had castrated months ago."

" _Don't fuck me on this, Ong_."

The doors creaked shut.

  
  


  
  


* * *

Chay bent over and took a deep breath. She felt like she had been drained of all of her energy. That meeting must have been the single most suffocating experience in her afterlife.

"Ahem, Ms. Ong? If you will follow me, please...

Chay followed the receptionist back into the elevator. She leaned against the elevator wall, trying to steady herself.

"I will return your firearm to you at the door. I must also repeat what Mr. Valentino said earlier: He does not usually hire outside sources for jobs he could usually do himself. He has put a lot of trust into you. You would do well to keep that in mind."

The doors dinged open at the ground floor. Chay followed the receptionist out of the elevator and down the staircase.

Chay was curious. "Did you know Mr. Profera and...."

"....the girl? Yes, I knew them."

"Do you think they would run away? Betray your boss?"

The receptionist scratched his chin with his tentacle. "Mr. Profera? I highly doubt it. He thinks very highly of himself, but he also values loyalty above all other things."

"Really?"

  
"Oh yes, very much so. He views himself as some kind of warrior poet. Like a knight of old. He regards his reputation as highly as Mr. Valentino. It would be very much against his character to do otherwise."

"What about the girl?"

  
  


"Her I don't know. She was a recent gain. But merchandise is merchandise, and it can be replaced."

Chay was _really_ starting to get sick of hearing that.

The receptionist returned to his desk and opened a drawer. "I will now return your property to you." He reached into the drawer and produced her gun, lovingly wrapped in a piece of velvet linen.

He also handed her.....her phone? _When the fuck did he..._

"Security purposes, ma'am", the Receptionist replied like he was reading her thoughts. "All photography here is strictly for commercial purposes. Mr. Valentino doesn't tolerate unsolicated pictures."

Chay turned the phone on. The battery was fully charged. The gun was also immaculate, even freshly polished and cleaned.

"Now then, Ms. Ong. Your contact will be meeting you outside. Do you require any additional effects before you leave?

She pocketed the gun, feeling it's weight in her hand.

"No, I don't believe I will."

"Very good, then. I wish you luck in your search. If you require any futher information after the fact, simply contact me. I've taken the liberty of putting myself in your contacts, so you will have no trouble telephoning me as needed."

Chay simply shook her head. At this point she wouldn't be surprised if he had also put his Sinder profile in there as well.

The receptionist nodded. "Good day to you, then". He sat back down and began thumbing through pages on his clipboard.

Chay signed and walked out of the building. Dusk was falling over Hell, and the red glow of Hell's sky was darkening into a wine-dark sea. The streetlights were beginning to flicker on, and she could see some of Valentino's employees already cruising the streets for potential customers.

Including, it seemed, her contact.

"Well fuck me sideways, Look who just crawled outta the fuckin' grave!"


	5. A Spider Approaches (and finding a place to crash)

\---*---

Hell is filled with an innumerable amount of nameless and random faces. Sinners great and small. Those who had been major deals in life, but reduced to mere mooks in death. Those who had been petty crooks when they breathed their last, but had managed to carve out significant empires in the infernos of Hell's society.

All of them came and faded, disappearing into memory as they were either cleansed, or simply faded into the aether, until they too were erased at the point of an Exterminator's spear.

So many Sinners, Imps and others who came and went, never to be recognized.

But  _ everybody _ knew Angel Dust.

The white spider-demon was leaning against a light pole, smoking a cigarette like he had just stepped out of an American noir movie (or one of the innumerable porn parodies of such, which he probably starred in at least once.). He was wearing a pink and white striped shirt with a hot pink collar, a black and purple bowtie, a black choker, a pair of ass-hugging shorts above a pair of thigh-high boots, and two pairs of hot pink gloves over his (four?) hands. One of his eyes was completely black. He also had a gold tooth (kind of like his boss). And also just like Valentino, Angel Dust towered over her, although he was quite a bit shorter than his boss, only standing at about nine feet (perhaps less without the boots).

- _ And did he have....boobs? _

"So I'mma guess yer Chay, yeah? The chick my boss hired to find Shakie?" He bent down to get a look at her.

_-Whoa... He's kinda cute..._

"Hellooooooo, Earth to Miss Bones! You tweaking or somethin?"

- _ Oh, right. This is supposed to be a conversation. _

She cleared her throat. "Ahem, yes. My name is Chay Ong, private investigator. Your employer just hired me."

"Yeah, yeah....perfect." He looked back at the Porn Studios, then bent down to her ear-level.

"Has he still got that tacky-looking throne in there?", he whispered. "I haven't been back in his office in a few months."

_-Wait....he hadn't been there?_

"Wait a second, He told me that you worked for him."

"Oh, yeah. I work for him alright, but I sure as fuck don't  _ live  _ with him anymore." He puffed on his cigarrette contemptuously. "And frankly, I think I was a  _ dumbass  _ for sticking with him as long as I did. I mean, have you  _ seen  _ how fuckin' filthy that place is? I bet there was a leak at the door, wasn't there?"

He threw his cigartte onto the sidewalk and stepped it out. "Naw, I moved out a few months ago. I got a better place now. No rent to pay, either! Anyway...."

He turned back to face her. "Now about Shakie...."

"Wait, Shakie....is that the name of the girl?"

He raised an eyebrow. "Wait, he didn't tell you who she.....oh, yeah. Of course.  _ Of course  _ he didn't fuckin' tell you her name." He smacked his forehead with a gloved palm. "Lemme guess, he called her 'merchandise', amirite?"

Chay nodded. "Yes, that's how the conversation went. He seems rather contemptuous of his employees."

"Baby, you don't know the  _ half  _ of it! I'm surprised he rubs enough braincells together to remember  _ my  _ name!".

He sighed deeply, tapping his forehead.

"Her  _ name  _ is Shakie. And she's my gal pal." 

That was strange. Chay had never met a Sinner who had showed anykind of empathy for someone other than themselves.

"Ok then...her name is Shakie. Good to know." She pulled out her phone and fingered through to the audio recording app. "And how long have you known her?"

"Wait...not here. Follow me across the street...". Angel motioned for her to follow him to the other side of the road, where there was a greasy diner....and a vending machine with labels like 'krokodil' and 'heroin'.

Angel inserted some change and hit the button labeled 'whippit'. A small orange canister rolled out from the machine's chute. He twisted off the canister's top and inhaled the nitrous fumes that rushed out.

"Ooooooh fuck that's the shit......". His head slightly lolled back, his eyes turning a light shade of red before vigorously shaking his head.

"Yeah, that's what daddy needed....Alright, toots! Ask away!"

"Ummmm...."

"What? You want some to? 'Fraid I emptied that one out, doll. You're gonna need to get your own fix..."

_-Whoa...he's kind of fucking annoying...._

"Oh, no. No thank you. I try to stay away from the harder stuff. Anyway....". Chay reached into her pocket and took out the photos of Profera and Shakie. She then returned to her phone, and pressed the record button.

"Ok, Angel Dust. Witness to the kidnapping and first lead. Interview starting......now".

Chay took a deep breath, collecting her thoughts and getting into her professional mode.

"Alright, Angel. You saw the victim being kidnapped, is that correct?"

"That's puttin' it lightly. She wasn't so much 'kidnapped' as she was 'punched in the stomach and shoved into the back of a sketchy van'. The whole thing happened so fuckin fast, to."   
  
  


"Did you get a good look at the guys who took her?"

"Not a good one. All of them were wearing this fruity get-up with these masks and these stupid black uniforms....Oh! But I do remember that weird symbol they were all sportin!"

_-Fruity? Wow, he's one to talk...._

"What symbol would that be?"

"It was a....what do you call it....that thing where it's a snake that eatin' it's own tail? Like in a circle or some shit?"

"You mean an Ouroboros?"

"Yeah, that thing! And there was this red circle inside of it with all of these little stars in it."

_-Stars...this sounds vaguely familiar..._

"Stars? Like a constellation?"

"Fuck if I know. I don't go for that card-reader bullshit."

_-Hmmm, interesting. An organization with an indentifying marker...._

"You think it may have been a gang or something?"

"Nope. Not any gang I've seen. And even if they were, they wouldn't last long here. This is Cherri's turf, and the last guy who tried to take it got his ass handed to him. Literally!". Angel cackled to himself, apparently really impressed with his own joke.

"I wouldn't know. I live in Imp City."

"Seriously? It was all over the fuckin' news! I was even on there....oh fuck it, whatever."

Angel sighed. "Anyway, the point was I didn't recognize 'em".

Chay nodded. "Do you know of anyone who would want to kidnap Shakie?"

Angel actually got really quiet for a moment.  _ Serious _ , even. 

"Honestly? Like, honest injun'? I thought my boss had snatched her at first."

"You thought Valentino had taken her? But wasn't she working for him in the first place?"

"Yeah, she was, but...."

Angel looked over at the Stuidos across the street, then swallowed, like he had a lump in his throat.

"Look, you wanna know why I wanted us to get across the street from that place?"

"Because you wanted a hit?"

"No....well, I mean yeah. But that wasn't the only reason."

Angel wiped his forehead. He appeared to be sweating rather heavily.

"The reason is....because Shakie was thinking of gettin' out of that place and movin' in with me."

Okay...that was definitely unexpected.

"...I think you need to explain."

"Yeah...yeah, sure. Look, remember when I told you I had another place now? Rent free and all that shit? Well, it's not just any place. It's this hotel and....well, look it's complicated, but all you need to know is that, among other things, the hotel is for demons like me and Shakie who want to get away from people like Val and....well, get cleaned up."

Holy shit. Angel Dust was going  _ clean _ ?

"So, Shakie was trying to get away from Val?"

"She's not the first. There's me, of course. But there's been a dozen or so who came after."

"And Val doesn't try to take them back?"

"Oh, I'm sure he's tried. But Val can only do so much,  _ especially  _ against someone whose got royal protection and...." Angel bent down and whispered in her ear "There's also the co-owner. You  _ really  _ don't wanna piss off that guy, no matter how fuckin' handsome he is."

Angel stood back up. "Anyway, I had to beg Val to do something about it. Once he realized it might be potential competition, he sent out Soldier Boy to track him down. And since he's hired you, I'm gonna guess that Profera is fuckin' MIA."

_-Right, Profera..._

"What do you think of Mr. Profera?"

"Hmmm....what do I think of Profera.....I think I could summarize him as 'obnoxious self-aborsed twat'."

"You don't like him?"

" _ Like  _ him? He annoys the fuck outta me! He's so fucking pretentious, thinking he's some kind of great poet or somethin', and wanting to put on these fuckin' concerts with the girls, trying to put on some opera or some shit.'

He  _ did  _ appear rather foppish in the photo. It appeared that it went a bit deeper than that.

"And now he's fucked off to who knows where. Wouldn't be surprised if he found another gig. Someone else to play the Shining Knight for."

"So you think he would betray Valentino? Valentino thought otherwise."

"Well, 'betray' wouldn't be quite the word I'd use. Profera is an insufferable shitheel, but he does believe in loyalty above all else. If he were to betray Val, he'd have to have done it because he found somebody else to follow."

Suddenly, there was a beeping sound. Angel reached into his shirt pocket and pulled out his phone.    
  
  


"Hold on, I'm gettin' a text."

Angel's eyes scanned his phone.

"Fuck...it's gotten  _ that  _ late?"

Angel stuck the phone back into his shirt.

"Alright, look...I gotta bounce but..."

Angel sighed and lowered his gloved hands onto her shoulders.

"Look, Shakie is a good kid....I mean, good as far as  _ this  _ place's standards are concerned...anyway, she doesn't deserve the shit that Val has been doin' to her."

Angel bent down and got to her eye-level. His eyes actually appeared to tear up.

"If you find her, I'm beggin ya....Don't give her back to Val. I can get her out of that place, and there's plenty of folks over at the hotel who are waitin' for her."

  
  


  
  


* * *

Crol rolled his soup cart up the street, towards West Side's red light district.

Considering how many decades he'd been stuck in Hell, he'd always found the idea that Pentagram City had a 'red light district' in the first place to be unbelievably funny. This city was an absolute cesspool of vice and sin by it's very nature, constantly in flux between the turf wars, the yearly Cleansings, and the random whims of Hell's upper-crust. From the best he could guess, the Sex Industry must have gravitated to this part of town purely due to Valentino's influence, slowly drawing it to himself the same way a lump of shit drew a crowd of flies.

"Kimchi?"

_Wait....was that...._

Yep. It was.

The same ghoul from earlier that day was in front of him yet again, this time blocking his way down the street.

"Oh, fuckin' A. It's  _ you  _ again."

"Kimchi stew. You got any?"

"You know, it wouldn't hurt you to at least say please."

"You tried to con me earlier. I already fucking hate you. Kimchi?"

Crol sighed to himself. He popped open one of the pots on his cart, with fumes from a pot of kimchi stew making his eyes water.

"You want any tofu?"

"No tofu necessary."

Crol shook his head as he ladeled the stew into a bowl, handing it to the ghoul.

"You know, I don't know what Hell's come to. Used to be you could deal with honest assholes who at least were willing to give you a handshake and a smile before they shanked ya. These new demons ain't got no class....."

"Not interested."

"Hey, fuck you! It's bad enough I had to deal with that bullshit from Pentious and Cherri Bomb in their fuckin' turf war, but then I gotta deal with these fuckin' Zoning laws and nearly get my ass run over by those assholes in that van..."

_-Wait, did he just say something about a van?_

"Um...excuse me."

"The fuck? Were you actually just  _ polite  _ there?

Chay signed and unwrapped her scarf from her face, stuffing it under her arm as she spooned bits of kimchi and spicy broth into her grinning maw.

"Whoa...no wonder you walk around looking like a fuckin' ninja."

"The van. You mentioned a van, right?"

What was with this chick? First she's a complete cunt, and now she wants to play nice?

"Oh...yeah. The van. I tell ya, it damn near plowed into me a couple of weeks ago."

The ghoul reached into her jacket and pulled out her phone.

"I should introduce myself properly. My name is Chay Ong. I'm a private investigator whose recently been hired by Valentino."

Crol's blood dropped a few degrees below freezing.

"Wait...you're working for  _ him _ ?"

"Calm down. I'm just an outside contractor. He hired me to find some missing people, among some other things. You mentioned something about a van?"

"Huh? Oh yeah, the van. Fucker nearly ran my-"

"Yes, yes. We've established that you were almost hit by the van. Can you tell me when this was?"

"It was a couple of weeks ago."

"You work this part of the city often?"

"Not until recently. I only started working here on the West Side about a few months ago. I figured that after the Cleansing, I might have better business here since this side was hit particularly bad. I tell ya, first week or so I was dodging random organs on the street left and right. Then there was that turf war....It had mostly died down by the time I got here, but they had people still shooting at each other for quite a while after. You ever had to clean Eggboi guts off of a cart wheel before? That shit  _ rusts _ ."

"Do you know who was driving the van?"

"I'm gonna guess it was those Snake assholes. I thought they were some of Cherri's boys at first, but these guys are more.....I don't know,  _ orderly _ ? Like they've actually been trained or something. They've been going around the city beating up random Sinners that looked at em funny. Reminds me of when I was in Korea..."

"What do you mean by 'Snakes'? Were they all snake-demons?"

"Naw, nothing like that. These guys were all kinds of demons. I call em Snakes because they were all wearing this snake badge on their shirts."

_-Snake badge.....A snake badge just like...._

"This badge...was it like a snake eating it's tail? Like in a circle?"

"Yup, that bullshit. It was wrapped around this red circle, and the circle had a Big Dipper in the middle. They also wear these black shirts....and these masks...."

The timeline was starting to line up a little. It appeared that this group, whoever they were, had already been attempting to establish a presence in Pentagram City for some time. Furthermore, they had a uniformed look and identity, as well as a plan of action.

She was suddenly having some uncomfortable flashbacks of her previous existence.

"You said they act like they're trained? Like military?"

"Well,  _ para _ military at least. Like, this isn't just some random bunch of goons. These guys have a  _ process  _ they follow."

"How would you know this in the first place?", Chay asked.

"Hey, I served in Korea! Fifth Air Force! I know drilling when I see it. They don't act like some regular street gang. They act like shock troopers."

Chay lifted up her bowl and drank some of the fiery kimchi broth. She shivered a bit as the heat from the peppers warmed her throat.

"Do they carry any weapons?", she asked.

"Just truncheons and knives, mostly. I haven't seen them with any guns."

"No guns? Really?"   
  
  


"Nope, none. Not even a pistol. Doesn't seem to phase them though."

"What do you mean?"

"I mean that they don't  _ care _ . I've seen them rush a group of goons that were armed to the teeth with munitions and firing away, and they were  _ still  _ actively charging into them like they were rushing a trench."

There was a buzzing sound coming from Crol's pants. He reached into his pocket and pulled out his hellphone.

"Fuck! That late already? Missed the post-coitus rush. Goddammit...."

Chay looked up at the sky. The pentagram moon was already out, and she could also see the Heaven star next to it. Pentagram City was pretty hazardous during the day, but it was particularly deadly at night.

Crol reached underneath the cart and turned off the heat-burners. He secured the metal tops on his pots, making sure they were fastened nice and tight to prevent spillage.

"Um, hey....what's your name?"

The kobold demon pulled down the shutters on the cart, closing them nice and tight.

"Crol. My name's Crol."

"Nice to meet you. Say, Crol....do you know where I could stay the night?"

Crol stared up at her. "Unless you're planning on hiding in a dumpster for the night, you're only chance is either the Hotel, or an abandoned shack."

Chay sighed audibly. "Goddammit...."

Crol looked Chay over. Now that he thought about it....other than the face, she wasn't  _ that  _ bad looking. The black shirt and trousers combo wasn't exactly form-fitting or anything, but he could tell from her arms that she had a bit of muscle on her. 

"Hmm....you know, I  _ might  _ be able to let ya spend the nigth at my place if you want."

Chay looked down at the kobold-demon. She wasn't exactly liking where this was going....

"I'm guessing you're not doing this for free, are you?"

"Now now, don't be like that. I'm not saying it's what's gonna happen...but, you know, if things work out that way...."

"Crol, I may not have been down here as long as you have, but I'm not stupid."

"Look, it's my offer. Take it or leave it."

Chay looked back up at the sky. She could hear a howling in the distance...and gunfire.

"Fine. Where do you live?"

Crol clapped his hands together. "Oh ho ho, you got yourself a deal girl!"

"Hey! I have  _ not  _ decided on  _ anything _ ! We'll discuss it. Later.  _ Maybe _ . Now where do you live?"

Crol walked over to the side of the cart, fumbling with a key ring.

"Oh, I live in the district towards the center of town."

"That far? We walking or something?"

The kobold-demon grinned as he kicked the side of the cart. A hidden compartment opened up from the cart's front...and out sprung the front wheel, seat and compartment of a scooter, complete with handlebars.

"Seat's kinda small, but I think you'll manage. Just be careful not to touch the motor. That's how I power the burners."


	6. It Hits When You Least Expect It...

Chay was still picking bugs off of her scarf when they got to Crol's apartment. Crol was swinging his key-ring around his finger.

"So small warning: I keep a lot of my ingredients in here, so it's a little packed...."

The door to his apartment swung open. It was pitchblack inside.

"Hold on, I gotta get the lightswitch..." He walked into the inky blackness. Chay could hear rustling and climbing sounds before the lights flickered on.

He wasn't kidding about the 'packed' part.

On the far wall was an array of shelves, packed with large jars of pickled produce: Tomatoes, onions, carrots, cucumbers, and peppers were all neatly packed against each other. There was also an array of mustards, sauces, and other condiments, and below  _ that  _ was a mixture of cookbooks. All were positioned next to an open window, which was arrayed with a metal screen. Near the shelves was an enormous red and white box, plugged into an outlet in the wall. 

"You have a kimchi refridgerator?"

"Pretty snazzy, right? That's where the kimchi for your stew came from. You were lucky you got it when you did, 'cuz I only got one more jar in there."

She couldn't believe that she was actually jealous. This guy lived in a quality three-room apartment while selling soup from a cart. Meanwhile she lived in a bombed-out one-roomer without a proper bathroom or cabinets. Granted, the conditions in Imp City were fairly dystopian on a  _ good _ day...but somehow this seemed especially unfair. 

"How the fuck have you managed to afford this?"

Crol sat down on his sofa ( _ because of course he has a fucking sofa _ , Chay moaned).

"Lots and lots of old fashioned hard work!"

Chay looked at the kobold-demon incredulously. "Seriously?"

" _ Fuck  _ no! I got this because the previous tenant got shanked by an Exterminator. I still had to blow the landlord, though. Speaking of which...."

Crol began eyeing Chay up and down, licking his scaley lips.

"Stop that."

"Hey, you haven't said no yet. That's still an open invitation in my book."

Chay shook her head. "Can I at least use your shower first?"

"Go ahead. Just don't use up all of the hot water."

Chay audibly sighed. She unwrapped her scarf from around her face as she walked into the bathroom and shut the door behind her.

Crol hopped off the couch and went over to his kimchi fridge. He popped open the top and dug around inside, emerging with a wine bottle and some glasses. And a whiff of fermenting cabbage.

"Phew!, that shit is  _ funky _ !"

He jogged back over to his sofa and popped the top of the bottle. It took both hands for him to pour his drink into his shot glass.

  
  


  
  


* * *

Meanwhile, Chay was still staring at herself in Crol's bathroom mirror. She couldn't believe how grody she actually looked. Not the fact that she was a walking skull, but the fact that she had allowed so much dirt and grime to collect in her eyes and nose-cavity. Now that she thought about it, it must have been  _ months _ since she'd been able to properly bathe.

She pulled her shirt over her head and threw it in the corner. Her pants, shoes and underwear followed. She reached into the shower and turned on the water.

The spray from the showerhead was pleasantly mild. She had forgotten how luxurious a good shower could be. She could feel several weeks of dust and grime slough off of her. Tired muscles began to feel alive again. Tired nerves began to feel alive again.

A  _ lot  _ of things were feeling alive again.

_....Oh no._

  
  


Her arm shot out in front of her in a desparat big to steady herself. She knew what this feeling was.

It was the  _ Hunger _ . The desire. The curse of her karmic existence. The absolute ache to  _ consume _ . She had been able to keep it dormant for several months, partly through her already Spartan existence in Imp City.

And it had mader her  _ careless _ .

She had been able to remain stable and to ignore the gnawing aches in her solely due to being denied so many basic luxuries, with her strongest indulgence being the hot chilies in her morning rice porridge. But she had allowed herself to become complacent with the mild comforts of this apartment.

The jealousy she felt should have been her first warning. But she had denied herself for so long that she crumbled under the very first sign of possible comfort.

She was going to need to get this under control, and quick.

* * *

  
  


  
  


Crol was drinking directly from the bottle when the bathroom door swing open.

The ghoul named Chay came stumbling out, naked and dripping wet.

Crol raised his eyebrows.

He had been right, she wasn't too bad looking underneath all of that black.

"Um....Chay, you OK there?"

She walked slowly towards him, each step shakey and uncertain, like she was fighting against something inside of her.

She grabbed the little kobold-demon by his shirt collor and slowly lifted him up.

"Bed. You have one?", she asked.

"Um....yes. Yes I do."

She stared directly into Crol's eyes. Her pupils were now pinpricks, and her corpse-like skin was flushed.

"Need it."

Her toothy maw opened up. A long green tongue snaked out as she licked his scaley neck.

"Um...OK. It's through that door over there..." He pointed to the door next to his sofa.

She slowly dragged him over to his bedroom, and kicked the door end.

"Chay, my dear.....are you sure you're OK? Should I call a-"

"Shut up.", she grunted as she kissed him.


	7. Waking Up With Regrets

_There was a full moon in the sky, illuminating sparse grass in a bare field. A man was tied to a chair, blindfolded and shivering in the night cold._

“ _What did he do?”, asks a young man._

“ _He complained about his food ration. Said it was too little for him and his family”, answered another._

“ _Where is his family?”, asked the previous young man._

“ _His child has died from malnutrition. His wife had received two warnings previously, so she was sent for re-education.”_

_A voice sounded from behind them._

“ _She is also dead. I was just there.”_

_It was the voice of a young woman, with long dark hair and a_ _stony_ _gaze_ _._

“ _So what do we do with this one?”, asked the second young man._

“ _The order has come down from Brother Number One”, says the young woman. She produces a pistol from her uniform and cocks it._

_The bound man can hear the sound. Fresh urine runs down his leg and onto the sparse grass._

“ _Please! I love my country! I’m just so hun-”_

_The young woman lifts the pistol at the man’s forehead._

_The gun fires..._

* * *

“ _Fuuuuuuuccckkkkk_ ”, Chay groaned as she felt her consciousness return to her. Her shoulders and back ached and her mouth felt incredibly dry. 

She was also sleeping in an unusual bed.

In an unusual room.

In an apartment she wasn’t familiar with.

… _...Oh Goddammit._

She had done it again. She had allowed the Hunger to grow unabated without realizing it, and in a desperate bit to get it under control she had climbed into a stranger’s bed and….

….and it was with Crol, the guy who had let her crash at his apartment so she could survive the night.

She looked over her shoulder at the kobold-demon, who was snoring rather loudly into his pillow. His butt was stuck way up in the air and his junk was dangling from between his legs.

_Yeesh, the guy must have some terrible sleep apnea…_

She slipped out from under the sheets, silently tip-toeing out of the bedroom on her bare feet. They hadn’t bothered to close the door, so there was no risk of potentially squeaky hinges to wake up Crol.

She walked to the bathroom and turned on the light.

Her skin was still a little flushed, and her hair was an absolute mess. It was embarrassing, in almost every possible way.  The shower from the previous night had done it’s job, but she was still sweaty.

She turned on the sink and drank a handful of water. It was actually relatively clean, compared to her hole in Imp City, and also relatively cool. It was probably the first bit of genuine pleasure she had experienced since her capsule had crashed into the sewer.

But the best part? She wasn’t feeling any ancillary jealousy or desire. Whatever she had done with Crol last night, it had managed to get it out of her system. She did wish that she could actually go to bed with someone she actually  _ liked _ , and without the psychotic desire to consume.

….. _Did_ she dislike Crol?

She wasn’t really sure. He  _ had _ given her food twice the previous day, and he  _ had _ allowed her to sleep at his apartment when she needed it. Granted, that was partly because she had payed for the first, and the possibility that she would have given him sex for the lat t er. But Crol wasn’t necessarily ugly or anything (at least by Hell’s standards)...and he apparently  _ did _ enjoy the previous night….

“Hey there lover. Feelin’ sore?”

Crol was standing in the bathroom door’s frame, wearing an open robe and rubbing his twig n’ berries….

….. _Yeah, fuck this guy._

She slammed the bathroom door in his face.

“Aw c’mon! At least tell me if you got off or not!”

* * *

She re-emerged from the bathroom a few minutes later, re-dressed and with her hair settled (or at least the best she could do without a comb). Her belongings were all accounted for and (mostly) in one peace.

Her phone vibrated in her pocket.

“Hey Chay! You want any breakfast?”, Crol asked (now thankfully clothed).

Chay reached for her phone. “You got any rice porridge?”, she asked.

“Coming right up!”, Crol answered.

Chay looked at the caller ID: It was Lucius.

She hit the answer button. “Morning, Lucius.”

“ _Holy shit, are you actually awake?!”_ , Lucius answered on the other end.

“I blame you.”, she answered tersely. “You’ve completely fucked up my sleep schedule.”

“ _You actually sound pretty lucid...and healthy. How the fuck did you survive the night?!”_

“One of the locals let me crash at their place. Was there something you wanted to talk about other than my unexpected survival?”

“ _What? Wait, I didn’t mean it like th- never mind. Look, how did it go with Valentino?”_

She looked over at Crol, who was stirring a pot of rice and boiling water.

“Let me put it this way...”, she replied. “I took a shower last night before bed. I took another this morning. After talking to Val yesterday? I feel like I _still_ need about fifty more.”

“ _Yeah, I’ve heard he has that effect on people.”_

“Yeah _…_.I'm sure you have. From your **sources** ”. She added an extra bit of acid to that last word.

“… _.Viola told you, didn’t she?”_

“Right before she launched me straight into Pentagram City’s sewer system.”

Crol walked up to her with two steaming bowls. “You want any pepper or something?”, he asked.

“If you got any black pepper and red chilies, that would be awesome”, she answered. Crol walked back over to the pantry and climbed up on the counter to get to his spice rack.

“ _You talking to someone?”_ , Lucius asked from the other end.

She turned back to her phone. “Yeah, it’s just the guy I crashed with asking about breakfast.”

“ _Damn… the fuck did you do to earn_ that _?_

“None of your goddamn business Lucius. Anyway, I did manage to get the job from Valentino. He wants me to hunt for two of his employees.”

“ _Any leads so far?”_

“A couple. Angel Dust filled me on some of the details and-”

“ _WHOA! Slow down there, Chay. Did you just say ‘Angel Dust’? As in the porn star?”_

“Yep. Turns out he’s the one who told Val about it in the first place. One of the missing was a friend of his. Apparently she was thinking of moving in with him and…”

“ _You mean at the Happy Hotel?”_

“Yeah, apparently he lives rent free there and…...wait, how the _fuck_ do you know this already?”

“ _How do you_ not _, Chay? Angel Dust was their first patron! Princess Charlotte Magne_ herself _went on 666 News and vouched for him publicly!”_

“ _..._ Huh. I didn’t realize they’d actually gone through with it. The fuck is the princess thinking?”

“ _Didn’t you at least see the Hotel when you arrived in Pentagram City? It’s kind of hard to miss…”_

“I kind of had to rush over to the Porn Studios for my appointment, Lu. Didn’t have time to stop and play tourist.”

“ _Seriously? There’s a fucking shipwreck bolted to the side of the….Nevermind. Did he tell you anything else?”_

Chay looked over her shoulder at Crol, who had finished seasoning both bowls of rice porridge. His had been topped with tofu slices and green onion, and hers was sprinkled with black pepper and crushed red chilis.

“Meet you on the roof!”, he called as he walked out of his door.

“I gotta cut this a bit short, but there’s something I’m gonna need on your end, Lu. I need your guys to do a little digging. See if they can come up with any info on this new group…”

“ _A new org? Gotcha. Any names or descriptives?”_

“Yeah. They all wear black, including masks, act like paramilitary, and they bear a symbol. An ouroboros wrapped around a red disk, with the Big Dipper constellation in the center.”

“ _Damn….they must have a good iconographer.”_

“That’s all I got, Lu. Think you can work with it?”

“ _More than enough. I’m sure we can scrounge something up…”_

“Good. Look, I gotta go eat breakfast…”

“ _Yeah, I gotcha. We’re gonna do some digging and try to get back to you before evening.”_

“Wonderful. Talk to you later, Lu.” Chay hit the ‘hang up’ button and pocketed her phone. Her stomach was rumbling.

She turned the knob on the apartment door and stepped outside. The streets of Pentagram City were already bustling and busy, with Sinners of every variety walking the streets. She could see demons walking to work, plotting things, shooting up, and  in general causing the average mayhem that made life in Hell an ordeal.

She reached in her pocket, making sure her gun was still there.


	8. Breakfast on the roof.

“Hey Crol, can I ask you something?”, Chay asked through a mouthful of rice porridge.

“Sure, shoot.”, Crol responded, also with a mouthful of rice porridge.

“Well, I’m just wondering about...well….”

Chay’s foot kicked out and struck the  four meters of cyclone wire fence that was surrounding both her and Crol,  even overhead . 

“….about _that_?”.

“The fence? Protective measures I learned in Korea. They definitely come in handy in this city. There’s a lot of really nasty shit that flies around here.”

She looked up overhead into the ruddy red sky, the white lines of the pentagram slicing through it. She could see vague shadows of... _ things _ flying miles above them.

“Good point.”

“By the way, I’ve been meaning ask you...can I take a look at that Apache you’re carrying?”

Chay reached into her pocket and pulled out the revolver. “You recognize this thing?”

“Yeah, it’s been a while since I’ve seen one up close though. Can I?”

She opened up the cylinder and emptied the bullets into her hands, pocketing them before handing over the now unloaded gun. “Handle it with care”, she said.

Crol took the firearm into his hands and eyed it carefully. “Wow, polished and everything.”

“Yeah, the receptionist at Val’s place cleaned it for me while I was talking to his boss.”

“You ever hear the story about these things?”. He bent the grip under the cylinder, putting the gun into it’s knuckle duster function.

“A little bit. My contact told me it was used by old timey French gangsters.”

“That’s part of the story. The design was originally from the mid-1800s. They mass produced these things for about a decade until the original manufacturer went under. Then they started flooding into France around the turn of the century. There was a bunch of petty gangsters who called themselves _Le Apaches_ who adopted them as their prized weapon.” 

Crol carefully folded out the blade near the barrel. “This isn’t one of those, though. This one looks like it may have been from WWII, or maybe even custom-made.”

“Why do you say that?”

The kobold-demon handed the gun back to Chay. “It’s the barrel. The original ones didn’t have much of a barrel to speak of. They basically operated like bellyguns. It was also pin-fire activated like old-style cowboy revolvers. This thing is more like a snub-nosed revolver, like the ones cops use.”

“Huh, imagine that.”. Chay folded back the blade and pocketed the gun. “So when did you encounter one of these? In Korea?”

“Nah, never saw them there. I first saw them here in Hell during my first few decades. Buddy of mine had it. Fellow veteran.”

“Another soldier?”

“Yeah, but he was a decade or so after my time. He works over at the Hotel now…” Crol pointed out to his left, over the rooftops.

Chay followed his line of sight to where he was pointing. She squinted her eyes through the forest of skyscrapers and cheap complexes.

Hunched in the middle of all of them was a red, ram-shackled building, looking like it had been patch-worked from several other, long dead buildings of smaller size. She could see pieces of an Asian pagoda, a Victorian balcony, an Elizabethan tower, and a piece of an old sea-liner all balanced haphazardly on top of an expansive complex. At the very top, in bright lights, were the words **HAPPY HOTEL** , over an enormous artificial eye.

“….Lucius was right. How did I miss _that_?”

“Certainly eye-catching, ain’t it? Also ugly as sin, so it’s perfect for this fucking place!”. Crol took one last bite of his porridge before tossing the bowl aside. “Anyway, he works the front desk over there. At least, when he isn’t drowning himself in booze.”

“Does he like it?”

“He _tolerates_ it. Way he sees it, he can stay there indefinitely with a steady supply of booze, and he’ll never have to worry about getting kicked out.”

“That’s all? There has to be a catch.”

Crol nearly fell over backwards with laughter.

“Oh, there’s a catch alright! His _boss_!”

“You mean the Princess?”

“Oh, fuck no. She’s a creampuff. She’s also the co-owner. No, I’m talking about the _other_ guy.”

The kobold suddenly became very quiet, with a haunted look forming in his eyes.

“There’s another demon who helps her run it. A Sinner. A very _dangerous_ Sinner-”

There was a loud crash and the sound of screeching tires.

Crol and Chay both charged through the fence’s swinging door and looked over the ledge.

From the rooftop, it was pure chaos. Several demons scattered as an enormous black armored vehicle drifted around the curb and sped into the street at high speed. On the automobile’s hood was an insignia in black and red: An ouroboros wrapped around a red circle, with the Big Dipper in the center.

“Look familiar?”, Chay asked.

“That’s it!”, the kobold shouted excitedly. “That’s the fucking van that nearly flattened me!”

Crol dashed over to the stairwell, nearly tripping down the stairs trying to descend to the ground floor. Chay followed after him, removing her gun from her pocket. Her eyes narrowed as she hastily reloaded the pistol and cocked the hammer.

This wasn’t a van they were dealing with: this was a fully armored  _ assault vehicle _ .

There were already gunshots filling the street when they their feet touched the pavement.

The ‘van’ had skidded to a stop in the middle of the road. The hatch on top of the vehicle was open, and a demon dressed in black tactical gear was firing a mini-gun  at random spots. A quartet of other black-garbed demons marched out of the vehicle’s rear, setting up a perimeter. Each of them wore the same uniform: black pseudo-military and identical gas masks, with small tactical daggers attached to their belts. They were all of different sizes, but they all moved as a unit.

B oth Crol and Chay ducked in an alleyway, covering their ears as bullets ricocheted off of brick.

“I thought you said they didn’t have guns!?”, Chay shouted.

Crol poked his head out of a nearby garbage can. “They don’t! The machine gun is new!”

Finally, the mini-gun whirred to a standstill.

Then, from the vehicle emerged another goon, carrying a limp mass over it’s head that had been wrapped in black cloth. Shorter than the other four, about three feet. It’s uniform was identical with the addition of a metal cuirass stretched across his chest.

It tossed the mass onto the street, and then kicked it as it laid limply on the  sidewalk .

“This one is no longer of use to the Prophet!”, it cried loudly through the distorting filter of it’s mask. “This is now filth, only slightly higher than dung by virtue of the breath in it’s lungs! All shall have a purpose for the Prophet! All shall salute Him, as you shall all salute us!”

The goon raised  it’s arm in salute, arm straight out with the palm upward.

“ _ET SUIT INFERNA!_ ”, it cried.

“ _ET SUIT INFERNA!_ ”, answered the rest of the squad, mimicking the salute.

“ _Suck – On – THIS!_ **”,** answered a...far off disembodied voice?

The cuirassed goon looked around him, his head whipping around as he tried to identify whoever it was that dared shout.

There was a small whistling sound, like something falling.

Then a small  _ tink  _ rang out as something bounced off the chassis of the assault vehicle before rolling onto the asphault.

It was a small red orb, with a black skull on it’s surface and a long fuse slowly fizzing away.

It was a cherry bomb.

“...Retreat, brothers!”

The mass of black-garbed goons dashed back into the assault vehicle, with the gunner on top diving back into the machine’s hull and slamming the hatch over him. The wheels squeeled on the asphault as the tires kicked up dust and debris.

The vehicle lurched forward just as the bomb exploded. The impact of the blast nearly lifted the vehicle off of the pavement as it screeched around the corner.

Crol and Chay ran out into the middle of the street, watching helplessly as the vehicle disappeared.

“Fucking Hell…” Crol remarked, shaking his head in disbelief.

Chay ran over to the mass of cloth on the sidewalk, which was still lying helplessly and vulnerable on the pavement. She could hear faint breathing as she tore away the fabric.

Bound in the fabric, unconcious and wheezing, was a felinoid-demon with curled whisker, cherry-striped blond hair, and zebra stripes on her face.

“Oh my fucking God, it’s _her_.”, Crol cried from behind her.

“It’s definitely Shakie alright”, Chay answered.

“NO!”, Crol shouted louder this time. “I’m talking about _HER_!”. 

Chay turned around just as Crol dashed back into the apartment building and slammed the door shut behind him.

From the settling dust and smoke from the bomb, she could hear the  furious  voice of a woman,  thundering over the blasted concrete.

“Who the **FUCK** was that tearing up my _turf_!?”

* * *


	9. Wild Cherry

When the dust cleared, one of Hell’s most infamous  crime lords stomped out on the broken concrete.

She was a cyclops-demon, about six feet tall, pale skinned with blonde hair (with pink and white highlights) tied into a rough ponytail and one single bloodshot eye. Her skin was sprinkled with pink freckles, and her clothing was haphazard and torn, like a  _ Less That Zero _ reject or a coked-up extra from a Cindy Lauper video. She wore torn leggings, a torn red miniskirt, an  off-shoulder crop top (that was worn over a black bra), and a single red boot.  She was juggling an unlit bomb between her hands

A nd she didn’t look happy.

“Are none of you fucking cowards gonna answer me?! Is Cherri gonna have to blow more shit up until she gets a fucking answer?!”

Then she turned her single eye to Chay, who stood alone among the rubble.

“You. I don’t know you.” She jogged up to Chay, bearing a sneer sharp enough to cut granite.

“I think I have an idea who you are, though.” replied Chay. “I’m going to guess you’re the one they call Cherri Bomb, right?”

C herri skidded to a halt mere feet away from Chay. “Good, you recognize me. That still doesn’t tell me who the fuck you are, or why you’re standing in the middle of a fucking warzone in  _ my _ territory!”

Chay raised an eyebrow. “To be fair, at least half of this was from your bomb.”

“I didn’t cause those fucking bullet holes!”, Cherri angrily waved her arm at the chipped bricks and broken windows caused by the assault vehicle’s mini-gun. “I also didn’t dump a giant piece of _trash_ out on to the-wait, who is that?”

Cherri slowly walked over to Shakie’s unconscious form, still lying limp on the sidewalk.

“You recognize her?”, Chay asked.

“Yeah. I’ve seen her working out here a few times before.” Cherri bent down and moved a piece of black cloth away from Shakie’s hair.

“You’re the second person I’ve encountered who recognizes her. Angel Dust was the other.”

_ That _ got her attention.

“This is Shakie, isn’t it?” Cherri jumped back up to face Chay. “This is the girl Angie has been telling me about for the past week. Who the fuck are you? How do you know Angel?”

Chay brushed dirt and debris off of her shirt.

“My name is Chay Ong. I’m a private investigator that was hired by Valentino to find some of his employees who had disappeared...well, only one now.” She tightened her scarf around her face.

“Angel Dust was the one who first brought it to Valentino’s attention. I met him outside of the Studio to learn more.”

Cherri whipped out her hellphone and starting tapping away furiously on the screen.

“I’m texting Angel now. Let’s see if you’re….”

The phone vibrated. Cherri read Angel’s reply.

“Huh...so you were telling the truth.”

“You should probably tell him that we found Shakie.”

“Yeah, I’m working on it...wait, he’s calling me.”

Cherri hit the ‘answer’ button and put the phone to her ear.

“Hey Angie! What do ya need?”

Chay stood awkwardly as Cherri continued a conversation she wasn’t in on.

“Yeah, she’s still here. What? You wanna talk to her?”

Cherri handed over her phone to Chay. “He wants to talk to you. Don’t use up my minutes, dammit!”

Chay shook her head as she put the phone to her ear.

“Hello?”

“Hey, Miss Bones!”, Angel’s excited voice shouted from the phone’s speaker. “You ain’t fucking with me, right? You found her?”

“Yes, we found her. Those guys you were talking about just dumped her on the sidewalk.”

“After they fucking trashed the place!”, screamed Cherri.

“Great, f-fucking great.”.

_Was Angel actually….crying?_

“Look, bones. Don’t go nowhere. Some of the employees at the Hotel are headed over there right now.”

“The Happy Hotel? What for?”

“I told you, already! She was thinking of moving in! The owners have this policy about protecting the guests, and technically she’s a guest.”

“When should I expect them?”

The sound of yet another pair of tires speeding through the road  screeched into Chay’s senses . Both Chay and Cherri braced themselves for yet another encounter with the ‘group’.

“Sounds like they’re almost there. It’s the guy who runs the front desk, and the chick whose the head of security. You’ll know em when you see em.”

Chay followed the sound of the tires as a white limousine pulled up to meet them.

* * *

The car stopped in front of them, mere feet from where they were standing. It was a luxury stretch limousine, with a shiny ivory chas sis and gold trimming on it’s body and rims. It had three pairs of headlights on it’s front, which wreathed a gaping toothy maw for a grill.

The left rear door flew open, and the first thing that emerged from it was not a Sinner or  a  demon.

It was a sharp Exterminator’s harpoon, pointing directly at Cherri’s face.

“Back the _fuck_ up, Cherri.”, said a deadly serious voice from within the limo’s interior.

Cherri threw up her hands in protest. “Whoooa, there girl.” Cherri slowly backed away from the car. “I’m not the villain here.”

“And yet, you’re here. Now back off.”

The harpoon’s owner slowly emerged from the limo. She was a  slim  moth-demon, with bright white hair  that had pink tips, gray skin, a yellow eye and an eye-patch (with a red ‘x’), and a red bow on her scalp. She was wearing a white mini-dress with black crosses on the chest and a belt, light-blue gloves and a choker around her neck, and a mismatched pair of stockings: one navy-blue, and the other striped with pink and blue stripes.

“Now, where is she?”

“She’s over here”, said Chay. “She unconscious but breathing.”

The woman carefully put the spear back into the limo and jogged over to Shakie’s sleeping form.

“How long has she been here?”, she asked as she knelt down next to Shakie’s head.

Chay knelt down next to her. “About fifteen minutes. The org’s goons chucked her onto the pavement and took off after Cherri showed up.”

The woman reached down and pried open one of Shakie’s eyelids. Her feline pupils were dilated.

“They drugged her, apparently. No telling what else they’ve also done.”

Chay looked into the woman’s one good eye. There was a lot behind that eye: anger, sadness, pain. Like she was reliving something in her head.

The woman looked over at Chay. “And I guess you’re Angel’s contact?”

Chay nodded. “Yes, that would be me. His boss hired me to find out the source of these recent disappearances.”

The woman looked at the rest of Shakie’s face and neck. There didn’t appear to be any other wounds.

“I guess you’re also to thank for her remaining relatively uninjured.”

Chay shook her head. “No, that was mostly pure luck. That and me managing to distract Cherri long enough for her to recognize who this was.”

The woman stood up and walked back over to the limo. She opened the door and called into the interior.

“Husk! Get out here! I need your help with something!”

A gruff, whiskey-soaked voice answered in kind: “Calm your tits, Vaggie,  I’m comin!”.

The door on the other side of the limo popped open. The first thing Chay saw was an enormous pair of cat ears, with a tiny tophat in the center.  As the figure rounded the corner, she could see an enormous pair of red-feathered wings, patterned with various symbols from playing cards (spade, heart, diamond, and club). 

It was a felinoid-demon, with taupe-colored fur on most of his body (with white fur for his face, chest and upper arms). He had brown eyes, with orange pupils, and black hearts positioned just below his sharp red eyebrows.  His fingers were topped with  _ enormously _ long claws, at least a foot in length.  His eyes looked droopy and exhausted, and his face was plastered with a permanent grimace.  He angrily mumbled to himself the whole way.

“Awright, where’s the guest?”, he asked.

“Right over there”, the woman said. “She’s alive, but she’s unconcious. Place her in the back of the limo, and _be gentle dammit!”_

“Yeah yeah, I know the drill.” The demon known as Husk bent down and picked up Shakie, slinging her over his shoulder. “Don’t ever say I didn’t do something nice for you.”, he grumbled.

“It’s your _job_ , Husk. Do you _want_ me to tell Alastor?”.

Husk rolled his eyes and grumbled as he gently placed Shakie into the interior of the limo.

Chay took a peek inside. The limo was a real luxury outfit, with leather interior and  trimmings .

“Whoa. Nice car.”

“It’s the royal limousine.”, said the woman. “One of the benefits of dating the Princess.”

She stuck out her hand for a handshake. “I’m Vagatha, manager and assistant to Princess Charlotte Magne, and head of security for the Happy Hotel.  My friends call me Vaggie. ”

Chay shook her hand. “Chay Ong, private investigator.”

Vaggie eyed Chay up and down. “You’re the one Angel was talking about. The one Valentino hired, right?”

Chay raised a bony eyebrow. “It’s been barely 24 hours and I’m already getting noticed”.

“News travels fast in Pentagram City”, Vaggie replied. “Especially when the Overlords are concerned. Valentino wouldn’t have agreed to hire you if your work history wasn’t already known. Me and Charlie try to stay out of the Overlords’ business if we can, but-”

“Charlie?”, Chay asked.  
  


“The Princess”, replied Vaggie. “She prefers to go by Charlie. You really are out of the loop, aren’t you?”

“Hey, gimme a break! I live in a fucking hole in a wall.”

The limo door slammed shut. Husk dusted off his hands as he lumbered back over to Vaggie. “Awright, she’s lyin’ on a blanket near the back. What now?”

Vaggie scratched her nose. “Well, at this point I’m guessing we’re gonna be taking her back to-”

A vibrating sound came from Vaggie’s dress. She reached into her pocket and pulled out her hellphone. She eyed the caller idea.

Her eyes widened.

“Whoa….OK. I gotta take this. Chay?”

“Yes, Vaggie?”

“Watch Husk and make sure he doesn’t do anything stupid.”

Husk eyed Vaggie incredulously.

“Hey, what the fuck?!”, he said as he through his hands up. “I’m the guy who works for you and….meh, fuck it.”. Husk reached into his collar and pulled out a flask. He popped off the top and drank. He belched as he re-covered the flask and shoved it back into his collar.

His droopy eyes suddenly took an unusual interest in Chay.

“Hey you…..do I know you from somewhere?”

_-The fuck?_

“Ummm….I don’t think so?”, she replied.

Husk leaned in closer. Chay could smell the alcohol on his breath.

“No no no…..I _definitely_ have seen you from somewhere.”. He pointed at her with one of his lengthy claws. “Were you in ‘Nam?”

_-Vietnam? He doesn’t sound Vietnamese._

“No, I’m not from Vietnam. I mean, I’m from that region?”

Husk shook his head vigorously. “No, I mean the  _ war _ . Were you in ‘Nam during the war? Were you partyin’ with Uncle Ho?”

_-This is starting to sound kind of racist…_

“No, I did not fight in Vietnam. I barely ever wandered near the border. I was a _kid_ through most of that!”

That seemed to annoy Husk even more.

“ _Look_ …”, he said rather authoritatively. “I may have been picklin’ my liver down here for a few decades, but I ain’t completely pickled my brain yet. And I know that I’ve heard _that accent_ ….”, he pointed at her shit, “…and had seen people in _that getup_ during the time I was farting around the South China Sea. Now who are you trying to fool here?”

Chay was going to reply (peppered with a few choice expletives), but was interrupted by the sound of Vaggie clearing her throat.

“Husk? Drop it.”

Both Chay and Husk turned to face Vaggie.

“Husk, I just got off the phone with management. Change of plans.”

Vaggie walked over to Chay and Husk, standing in between them.

“I’m going back to the Hotel with Shakie. But you’re sticking around with Miss Ong, here.”

Husk’s eyes widened (so much so that Chay could see the stringy red veins in  his retina). “The  _ fuck _ are you talkin’ about?”

“Nifty can handle the front desk for a little while. You’re other skills are needed.”

Vaggie turned to face Chay.

“Chay, was Shakie the only person you were hired to locate?”

Chay shook her head. “No, Valentino also hired me to locate one of his procurers as well. He also ordered me to….deal with whoever this new competition is supposed to be.”

Vaggie groaned as she rubbed the bridge of her nose. “So you’re an assassin as well.”

“Not normally, no. But I took this job as a favor for a colleague, so my hands are tied.”

Vaggie rolled her eyes. “Fine, whatever. But you should know that any order from an Overlord is automatically overruled by a royal decree.”

Husk raised an eyebrow. “Oh fuck, you weren’t kiddin’ when you said ‘management’.  _ She’s _ interested in this?”

Chay was confused.

“That phone call, was that..?”

Vaggie raised her hand to cut off Chay’s sentence.

“Chay Ong, as manager and messenger of the Princess I have been given the honor of delivering to you the following message. Treat my voice as Her’s.”

Vaggie cleared her throat, and spoke in extremely formal language.

“As Princess of Hell and Heir to the throne of King Lucifer Magne... I, Charlotte Magne, hereby order that Chay Ong use whatever skills needed, and whatever means deemed necessary, to discover the source of these current disturbances, and to deal with them with the severity that you deem needed. I furthermore order that my employee, Husk, use his military skills and experience to assist you in this endeavor. You shall me compensated for your labor, as well as the labor undertaken for your current employer. I have spoken, so mote it be.”

Husk stared.

“You gotta be shittin’ me.”, he said.

Vaggie smirked. “You wanna talk to her yourself?  Or maybe to Al? ”

Husk looked between Chay and Vaggie.

“…..No.”, he replied quietly.

Chay was flabbergasted. She threw her hands up in protest.

“Whoa, hold on here. This all sounds like a sweet deal, but you _barely_ know me. Fuck, you only know me by my reputation via Valentino, and just how trustworthy do you think _he_ is?!”

“Yeah! What she said!”, Husk replied in kind.

“I’d vouch for her!”

All three whipped their heads around to see Crol standing in the door-frame of the apartment building. Chay grunted in aggravation.

“How long have you been standing there, Crol?”

“Around the time the limo rolled up. You guys say something about military experience?”


	10. Strategy Meeting

“So if you’re gonna do this, then the first thing you’re gonna need to do is reconnaissance.”

Crol was standing on a chair near his dinner table, a bottle of whiskey gripped between his tiny hands. Chay and Husk were seated across from him, with Chay sipping on a warm bowl of miso soup, and Husk ‘sipping’ on a bottle of rotgut. Vaggie had since left for the Hotel (with Shakie in tow).

“No shit, Sergeant Slaughter.”, replied Husk. “The question is _how_? We can’t just ask around for their HQ, and I’m gonna take a wild fuckin’ guess that they wouldn’t just let us bum a ride.”

Crol slammed his bottle down on the table (somehow miraculously not shattering either table or bottle). “Obviously. These guys have a pretty tight operation. But look at what just happened: They seemed to talk a pretty big game, but they were fucking _terrified_ of Cherri. What does that signal to you?”

“That they’re cowards?”, asked Chay.

“No, that they’re about _spectacle_. It’s true that they like to put on the image of an indestructible force, and I know from experience that they aren’t afraid of charging into a hail of bullets. But they didn’t do that this time. As soon as they saw Cherri’s bomb, they tucked their tails between their legs and fucked off.”

“Huh.”, Chay said. “They’re willing to charge headfirst into a hail of bullets with just knives, but as soon as they saw one little bomb they retreated.”

“Wait a minute…”. Husk scratched his nose in thought. “When was the last time you saw these guys actually fighting?”

“A couple of weeks ago”, Crol said. “It was a gang of Eggbois who I think were working with Pentious. They were all outfitted with machine guns and rocket launchers. But these guys came charging out of that fucking bucket they ride around in and turned them into omelets.”

“With just knives?”, Chay asked.

“Yep, and clubs.”

“Hmmm. When was the last time Cherri was out in the streets?”

“I’ll answer that one”, Husk answered gruffly. “I’ve seen Cherri in action before. _Everyone_ in Pentagram City has. Our first patron is pretty tight with her.”

Chay sighed. “And again, I find out how much of a fucking luddite I’ve been.”

“Look, you’re from Imp City. They tend to keep to their own thing when they can. But the rest of Hell was watching TV after the last Extermination. That was the day Charlie announced the opening of the Hotel. It was also the same day that a new turf war started in the West Side.”

Crol nodded. “Yeah, I had just moved into my new digs before the war started. I basically spent the whole day hiding in a trashcan.”

“I always assumed you just lived in them.”, Husk replied. “Anyway, that was the day Sir Pentious decided to take over the West Side with his Eggboi army. Cherri was the one who stopped him in his tracks.”

“She had an army as well?”

“No, just her…..Well, her and Angel Dust.” Husk took a swig of liquor and belched. “But Angel didn’t show up until the end.”

Chay’s eyes widened. “Wait...I think I get it now. They  _ didn’t _ run away from Cherri because they were afraid of her. They ran because it was a battle they knew they  _ couldn’t win _ .”

“ _Exactly._ ”, said Husk. “One of the major rules of guerrilla warfare: you only attack if you’re sure you can accomplish the mission. If it’s a superior enemy, then at best you harass them as long as they’re stationary. Otherwise? You retreat.”

“Cherri is basically a one-demon army.”, replied Chay.

“That’s not even the half of it. You saw the damage she did out there. She threw a bomb right into the middle of her territory and basically made the damage _worse_. It isn’t just that she’s strong. It’s also that she’s reckless. I’ve seen her level an entire city block because she got a bad batch of hash.”

“Holy shit…”, Chay said, her eyes filling with understanding as some important puzzle pieces clicked together in her head. “They not only ran because they thought they were out-gunned, but because they found another force that was as reckless and theatrical as they were.”

Crol sipped at his whiskey.  “ But they are still active around here even  _ with _ Cherri’s presence. So even if they  _ are _ scared of her, they still see this as some kind of safe territory.”

Husk shook his head. “I dunno about that. If that were the case, then why haven’t they tried to just take over territory outright?”

Silence filled the room. It was a real conundrum: This group was obviously confident enough that they could gang up on heavily armed groups, but with the Overlords (and the wannabe overlords like Cherri) they preferred either stealth, or simply avoiding them altogether.

“Have they ever tried to strike anywhere else?”, Chay asked. “I know they’ve never done anything is Imp City, and I’m guessing they haven’t gone near the other territories in Hell. They seem to be centered entirely on Pentagram City.”

“Wait, wasn’t there a whore house that was bombed in Imp City a few months back?”, Husk asked.

Chay rubbed the space between her eyes (that _would_ have been her nose). “No, that was an ILF action. That was a massive ‘fuck-you’ to the guy who ran it for exploiting Imps.”

“Who was the owner?”, Crol asked.

“Some asshole named Flynn.”, Chay replied. “He’d recently set up shop in the city and was picking drug-addicted Imps off the street for Sinners to have sex with. Either way, he died in the blast…you OK there Husk?”

Husk’s face was buried in his palms, vigorously  massaging his temples like he was trying to rub enough brain cells together to form a memory.

“Yea, I’m fine…..did you say the guy’s name was Flynn?”

“Have you heard of him?”, Chay asked.

“I don’t know….I might have. There was a guy named Flynn who used to live here in the West Side, near the News Station. He ran this shitty little bar that sold bootleg hooch he brewed in a toilet in his apartment. Tom Trench used to duck in there all the time to get a swig of moonshine before he went on camera. It was really close to the center of the Pentagram.”

Crol stroked his chin. “Yeah, I remember that guy. Short little orange Sinner with scaly eyelids and green hair. He up and left town shortly after the Extermination. Weird, too… He’d been there for decades at that point. I’d thought he gotten the business end of an Exterminator’s spear, but he actually had a fucking ‘Closed Indefinitely’ sign on his front door!”

“Yeah, he was doin’ good business then.”, Husk said.

“Why is him leaving strange, though?”, Chay asked. “A lot of people flee the big urban areas when the Exterminators show up.”

“Because he had never left like that before. I mean, shit, during the Extermination before last he’d damn near gotten bombed out of the fucking building, but he simply rebuilt and re-opened business again.”

Husk leaned back in his chair, his hands behind his head. “Trust me, that guy was no pushover. He may have been tiny, but he was a scary motherfucker. Anyone got up in his face, he just pulled out that Apache pistol he had under the bar and wave it under their nose. Claimed the knife on the barrel was made out of Heavenly Minerals for Exterminators.”

Crol immediately perked up. “Oh, right! Hey Husk, remember that Apache you showed me years ago?”

“Barely”, grumbled Husk. “At least vaguely. A few decades of binge drinking will do that to ya.”

“Oh, come on! You have to remember this! You were holding it for some one! Collateral, I think?”

“Oh fuck, don’t remind me. Yeah, Flynn had given it as collateral for a loan. I was working with Al’s money lending operation back then. Not voluntarily, mind you. But yeah, I remember it...it was a custom job.”

That last sentence got Chay’s attention. Crol had said that the pistol she had must have been custom-made. Was it possible that….

“Custom-made how, exactly?”

“Uuuuh….lemme think a sec.” Husk downed the rest of his rotgut, deep in thought.

“Uuuurr…..I think the big difference was the barrel. Normal Apaches basically were made like belly guns with no barrel to speak of. That was the whole point of their design, see...they’re concealable weapons that you use in a street fight, like when you gotta shank some poor bastard on a wharf somewhere. Flynn’s gun was different.”

Chay leaned in closely. “Was it like the barrel of a snub-nosed revolver?”

“Yeah! Thing was, it still functioned properly in spite of that. You’d think having that little divot for the knife would fuck up the barrel...how’d you guess that?”

Chay looked between Crol and Husk. She reached into her pockets, grabbed her gun, and slammed it on the table.

“Look familiar?”, she asked.

* * *

After much deliberation and consideration (and Husk’s drunken bitching), a couple of facts had become apparent:

1\. This organization, whoever they may have been, were centered almost entirely around the West Side of Pentagram City, and never left it.

2\. In spite of talking a big game, and showing instances of near ly suicidal bravery ( even though suicide was something that could n’t actually  _ happen _ in Hell),  they tucked their tails and ran whenever facing someone they considered a genuine threat, which also lead into…

3\. The reason they had not extended outside of the West Side was due to the fact that the rest of the Overlords (and petty bosses like Cherri) were a genuine threat, meaning…

4\. Wherever their hideout was, it was somewhere  within the West Side itself,  or nearby .

That only left the big question: What were Chay and Husk going to  _ do _ about it?

As Crol had stated earlier, recon was going to be the name of the game here. If they were going to track this group to their hideout, then the best action they could take at that specific moment was a passive one: simply wait until the group poked their heads out of their hiding place, and then attempt to follow them back to their base.

But that also brought up another round of speculation: Where could they possibly be hiding? Pentagram City was practically the size of a small country, and the West Side was filled with an endless labyrinth of alley ways and shortcuts.

“And that’s not even mentioning the sewers…”, Chay remarked, shivering a little.

C rol stroked his chin. “Well here’s an idea:  There’s three of us here, so that’s three pairs of eyes.  Let’s try to think of the top three places they could possibly be hiding. Then, when they finally decide to poke their heads out again, the three of us can keep an eye on those spots and see if they show up.”

Husk shook his head. “There’s a couple of flaws with that. For one, we could all be completely off base and never actually see them. Second, even if we do manage to see them farting around the city, we could just as easily completely lose track of ‘em, and then we’re right back at square one. And third…”

“...Even if we do track them down to their hideout, what do we do then?”, Chay finished for him.

Husk gave her the side-eye. “Well I was going to say something along the lines of ‘ we will still be sitting on our asses until then’….but yeah, I guess that also works.”

“Nobody said we couldn’t be using our time constructively...”, said Crol.

C hay eyed Crol suspiciously. “Meaning…?”

Crol shrugged his shoulders. “Fuck if I know. Just a suggestion. But for right now, let’s try to think of places where they could be hiding out. Any ideas?”

“Well, my first suggestion would be somewhere around Valentino’s studio”, Chay said.

“It’s a start, at least. But I doubt Valentino would just let anyone near that place and do the kind of damage these guys are doing. Still…”

“That’s the thing, though.”, Chay replied. “Angel Dust told me that he’d seen these guys driving around and snatching Valentino’s employees. So they have to be close by.”

Husk picked his nose with one of his claws. “But even if that were true, they couldn’t be  _ too _ close to Val’s place, otherwise he would have scorched the whole fucking area to try and get to them.”

“So it would have to be someplace inconspicuous. Some place they could go in and out of without making much noise. Any places around here that are abandoned and boarded up?”

“Very fucking few”, replied Husk. “The last Extermination took out a good chunk of the Sinner population, but there’s always new ones ready to fill the void.”

“What about that place you mentioned earlier? The one that was owned by Flynn?”

Husk shrugged. “It’s a fucking start, I guess. But you’re gonna be real close to the city’s center, so prepare accordingly.”

“I still think one of us should keep an eye on Val’s place.”, Crol suggested. “They might not be coming from there, but they’re definitely operating in the area. If they show up again, if nothing else we can find out which direction they run off to.”

“Alright, so that’s two places. What’s the third?”

Husk leaned back into his chair and sighed. “Fuck if I know. How about the donut shop?”

Chay and Crol both raised an eyebrow.

“Really?”, Crol said.

“You guys have a donut shop here?”, Chay asked.

“What? They’re good donuts! Besides, Charlie loves that place. She’s like their most famous customer or some shit.”

“Well, at any rate…”, Crol jumped off of the table and back onto the floor. “We’re not doing anything until they show their faces again. So my suggestion would be hunker down for the evening and get ready for tomorrow.”

Chay looked out the window.

_-Wow, it really has gotten late…_

“Best fucking suggestion I’ve heard all day!” Husk got up and stretched, barely keeping his wings from knocking over everything in the apartment. “I dunno about you, but I could use some air. You guys got a way to the roof, right?”

Crol nodded in the direction of the fire escape. “Yeah, out the door and to the left.”.

“Bitchin”. Husk walked over to the door and turned the knob. “I’ll be barfing off the sides if you need me. Oh, and Chay?”

Chay perked up. “Um, yeah Husk?”

“Join me on the roof in a bit. You and me need to talk.”

Husk opened the door and left the apartment, leaving an obnoxiously pregnant pause in his wake.


	11. Heart to Heart

Husk was smoking a cigar and tapping the ashes into the alley below when Chay climbed to the roof. His wings were close to his back, and his head was hunched over the side, staring off into the bloody crimson of Hell’s sunset.

“You wanted something?”, Chay asked.

“Yeah...sure. Join me for a smoke?”, he waved his cigar towards her, not even bothering to turn around and look her in the eyes.

“No...I don’t smoke. Never liked it.” Chay felt her skin prickle. She had only known Husk for a few hours at this point, and yet his entire body language had her on edge. He was oddly reserved, even methodical.

“Have it your way.” He puffed on his cigar again, the cloud of smoke rising up over his head.

_-Alright, fuck it._

“Husk...what’s your problem? You’ve been eye-balling me since you showed up. You look like you expect me to stab you in the back at any given nanosecond. Just come out and fucking say what’s going on!”

Husk didn’t immediately respond. He simply kept puffing on his cigar and staring out into the distance.

Then he started to chuckle. Lightly at first…and then louder. By the time he turned around to face her, he was almost doubled over with laughter.

“ _Expect_ you to? Bones, where the fuck do you think you _are_? How long have you been down here, exactly? I don’t know how they do shit in Imp City, but here in PC you trust _no-one_. This world is the fucking industrial run-off of humanity! And the world before was _barely_ any better. Open your fucking eyes.”

Chay grumbled to herself. _Why does everyone keep calling me Bones?_

“Is that what you brought me up here for? To bitch at me about things I already know?”

Husk wiped away a tear from his eye, still chuckling in his throat. “Naw, that’s not it. I did enjoy it though….no, I just have one more thing to you, and it’s really fucking important so you better listen.”

Chay crossed her arms. Her scarf billowed in Hell’s breeze. “Alright, I’m listening.”

A grin slowly grew at the side of Husk’s mouth.

“Bones….”

Husk put his cigar back into his mouth, his grinning teeth gripping it in his  maw .

“ _M_ _eak robsa anak kuchea sreisaamphoeng._ ”

Chay blinked.

Then her eyes grew larger as realization slowly washed over her.

Then the yellow pupils of her eyes shrank with anger.

“You son of a bitch…what did you just call my mother?”

Husk snapped his fingers. “ _I fucking knew it_! Holy fucking shit but I _fucking knew it!”_

Husk threw his cigar to the floor of the roof and stamped it out. “I cannot believe I didn’t figure it out sooner! That accent! That get-up! That fucking _scarf_! I _knew_ I recognized all of that shit!”

Husk walked up to Chay, and got directly in her face. He poked her chest with one of his claws.

“ _You were in the fucking Khmer Rouge!”_

Chay said nothing. She just stared at Husk with...she wasn’t sure _what_ she was feeling at this very moment. Contempt? Impressed? Some mutant combination of the two? She’s been so used to not being recognized for so long that at this point she wasn’t sure how she should react in the first place.

Husk shook his head, laughing to himself like he’d struck oil.

“Why didn’t I realize it sooner? Of COURSE you weren’t partyin’ with Ho Chi Minh! _‘Grew up in the region’?_ Yeah, cuz you were fightin’ under goddamn _Pol Pot_!”

“….I don’t want to talk about this right now.”, said Chay quietly and mostly to herself (or menacingly. At this point Husk was too drunk to tell the difference).

Husk reached back into his collar and pulled out his flask, gulping from it loudly. He wiped away stray liquor from his whiskered face.

“So tell me...how’d you die? Massacred in the Killing Fields? Starved to death on a collective farm? Bite it at a re-education camp? Maybe you got your ass handed to you during a raid on a Vietnamese rice paddy…..Oh wait, I know!….”

Husk lurched forward and grabbed a piece of her scarf.

“You got purged for being outta uniform! You fuckers didn’t wear _checkered_ scarves, you wore fucking _plaid_!”

Chay stared at the floor, grinding her teeth.

“...I couldn’t find a plaid one when I got here.”, she replied quietly. “This was the closest thing I could find in the jungle. I was lucky to find clothes at all”.

“Uh huh, I’m sure you did Chay.”

The feline-demon retook his spot at the roof’s edge. He reached into his collar and produced yet another cigar. He snapped his claws like a pair of fingers, and the friction produced a small flame he used to light it.

“I just realized…”, he said as he took his first puff. “It’s even in your name. Chay Ong. Like ‘chhaoeng ‘. As in ‘Bone’. And I thought Al had picked the laziest nick-name…”

“….You’re enjoying this, aren’t you?”

“Damn straight I am. It’s one of the small pleasures I can get in this afterlife.”

Husk took a long drag on his cigar, exhaling smoke rings into Hell’s evening. “So you didn’t answer my question….how did you die?”

Chay sighed with all the weight of her guilt.

“I was purged.”

Husk chuckled a single laugh under his breath. “Fucking called it again.”

Chay walked over to the edge and took a place next to Husk.

“It was 1978, a year before the Vietnamese invaded. Things weren’t going well. Brother Number One had decided to come out of hiding and start pushing his image among the people. At that point he’d done everything through a proxy, never showing his face. But now he decided he wanted idols built for his personality cult.”

Chay looked down at the alleyway below. A couple of demons were shooting up heroin. One of Val’s girls was among them.

“I’d been part of the Santebal. I was responsible for weeding out counter-revolutionary thoughts and actions. I snatched people in the dark of night and delivered them to the re-education camps, naked and shivering. I shot farmers who were starving and begging for increased rations because their selfishness would jeopardize our plans for Year Zero”.

Husk took another puff of his cigar. “That about lines up with what I’d heard was happening back in the day. Then 1978 happened.”

Chay shook her head. “That wasn’t what got me killed. The Vietnamese invading was only a matter of time. We’d already been having border skirmishes with them when they ended our alliance the previous year. Then a bunch of Khmer crossed the border and razed several villages. But I wasn’t alive to see it.”

“Mmhm. I’ll bet.”

Chay turned and gave her current companion the side-eye. “You want to hear this or not?”

Husk grunted. “Just get to the point.”

Chay grunted herself. “Fine. To make a long story short: I, at some point, commented about how I thought Brother Number One putting his face out there went against our ideological ethos. Somehow word got to him, and I was liquidated. Fifty years later, and here we are. The End.”

“Yeesh, talk about going around your ass to get to your elbow”. Husk took one last drag of his cigar before dropping in into the alleyway below. It bounced off of a junkie’s head before falling into a trashcan, lighting its contents on fire.

“So because of your previous life, you ended up like...well, like _that_.”

Chay curtsied sarcastically. “A Hungry Ghost. An undead embodiment of pure, un-ending desire. Just like in Chinese myth. Karma has a sick sense of humor.”

“Heh, well there’s something we both have in common then.”

Husk spread his wings out wide, showing his entire feline form.

“Ya know what I really hated when I was alive? Cats.”

* * *

Chay was almost asleep on Crol’s couch when her hellphone vibrated.

She drowsily looked at the Caller ID. It was Lucius’s number. ‘Before too late’, he’d said. Funny.

“Lu?”

“ _Try again. It’s Viola.”_

“Why are you using Lucius’s phone?”

“ _Because mine needs charging and we only have one working charger.”_

The ILF’s infamous incompetence strikes again.

“ _But to get to why I’m calling: Me and Lu got that info you wante_ _d._ _.._ _mostly me, but Lu helped._ _”_

Chay sat up, stretching out her back and yawning. “Nice timing you got there. It’s nearly one in the morning…”

“ _Lu didn’t account for time changes. But you’ll want to hear this now, because we haven’t just got second-hand information here.”_

“...Explain.”

“ _The ILF doesn’t just have information about these guys. We’ve_ met _.”_

Chay’s eyes widened. She shot up from the sofa and was on her feet. “You better start talking, Viola. If Lu has gotten me into even more trouble because of his bullshit…”

“ _Relax, Chay. This was from one of our soldiers, not Lu. Were it otherwise I would have mailed you his head.”_

She was getting really irritated at having people tell her to ‘relax’. There was _nothing_ to relax about here.

“ _Do you remember the Imp who greeted you at the door of our Headquarters?”_

“The one who screamed _‘let her in!’_ at the top of his lungs for every goddamn citizen of Imp City to hear?”

“ _Yeah, him...he has trouble controlling the volume of his voice. But he’s the one who tipped us off when we started our research this morning. He used to live in Pentagram City…”_

Chay walked over to the window and looked out into Hell’s night. The city was still heavily illuminated with neon, spot lights and the occasional bonfire. The Pentagram moon loomed below the celestial Pentagram that was the permanent marker of this city’s skyline.

“So he’s encountered them before?”

“ _They actually tried to recruit him. Once we showed him the emblem you described to us he instantly recognized it. Then we couldn’t get him to shut up about it. From there we were finally able to deduce who these guys were, and what they’re trying to do.”_

“Hold on…” Chay swiped through the apps on her hellphone before she got to the ‘record call’ function. She hit the record button.

“Alright, tell me what you have.”

“ _So first thing’s first: they’re called Inferna.”_

“Not terribly creative.”

“ _This is Hell, we’re not exactly swimming in genius down here. Anyway, they’ve been publicly active in Pentagram City for a while...three years, at least. Lu thinks they’ve actually been operating for longer than that, but they didn’t really make any noise until the Extermination last year.”_

“But they had been causing havoc before then?”

“ _No more than what’s average for PC. Turf wars are always a thing there, and there’s always some new wannabe trying to hone in on someone’s territory. But it was last year’s Cleansing where they started doing the high-profile shit.”_

“Like…?”

“ _Like bombarding a small bar with grenades as the Exterminators were cleaning up.”_

“Damn.”

“ _Didn’t phase the owner though. Two days later he came out of hiding and rebuilt the place. But he must have gotten cold feet because he left town right around the time of the last Extermination.”_

“….I’m gonna need to talk with Husk and Crol about this in the morning. I think they actually knew the guy who owned it.”

“ _Oh, but it gets better. We have some info about the guy who supposedly runs Inferna. He’s some guy they call The Prophe t. Nobody knows who he actually is, but whenever he’s seen in public he’s always making these grand speeches about manliness and the glory of bloodshed.”_

“Like Hell isn’t already filled with assholes exactly like him.”

“ _Here’s the fun part: That symbol that you asked us to look into? It actually has precedent. Historical precedent.”_

“Historical like in the living world?”

“ _Yup. How familiar are you with World War I?”_


	12. Reconaissance and Infiltration

“...And that’s what she told me.”, Chay said into her phone.

Chay was perched on top of a nearby warehouse, close to Val’s place, using the focus feature on her hellphone as a makeshift telescope. The weather was less humid then it had been the previous two days, and she had gone back to wrapping her scarf around her face. Below her, she could see some of Val’s employees chatting it up near the building, either smoking or displaying what they had to offer (two of them were even making out with each other in order to entice business. She wasn’t sure if it was working).

“I shoulda’ figured that they’d be recruiting Imps.”, Husk groggily answered. He was hanging out on top of a fire escape next to the empty building that was once’s Flynn’s dive bar. The studio for 666 News could be seen just down the street, and a billboard with the grinning visage of anchor Katie Killjoy was polluting the view in Husk’s binoculars. “Imps get treated like garbage as it is down here, so they’re easy marks for shit like this.”

Munching sounds could be heard from Crol’s end. “You were right, Husk. These donuts are amazing!”.

“Fuckin’ told ya!”, Husk replied.

Crol had managed to take the donut shop as his area of surveillance. Crol thought it would be a good mid-way spot as it was located in an area that was equidistant to both the Red-light District and the border with Pentagram’s center.

(Chay, of course, thought he took it because he was a coward.)

Crol was sitting on the street corner outside of Evil Donuts, eating his way through a  box of chocolate-glazed  crullers and eyeing the scantily-clad demon ladies that wondered past him. One demon’s particularly voluptuous rear-end had especially caught his attention.

“Just don’t get distracted.”, Chay said. “I don’t want to have to do this again tomorrow night if I don’t have to.”

“How are we sure they’ll even make an appearance?”, Husk said. He was focusing his binoculars on the road, the sidewalk, and every possible entryway onto the street. “They ran away with their tail between their legs last time, don’t you think they’d rather lay low for a couple of days and regroup?”

“Oh, they’re gonna make an appearance. I’m counting on it. If what I think about their leader is right…”

Then he heard the skidding tires.

Crol immediately jumped up from the sidewalk and climbed up the Evil Donut’s drain pipe, plopping himself on the building’s roof.

“Guys, I think I hear them coming!”

“Which way are they going?!”, Chay shouted.

Crol peeked over the side of the building, eyes darting left and right. The black assault vehicle had finally made it’s appearance, drifting around the street corner and slamming into a light pole and a mailbox before taking off down the road, leaving dust and rubber-burned smoke in it’s wake.

As far as the kobold-demon could tell, it was heading west.

“It’s heading downtown, Chay!”, he shouted into his phone through a coughing fit. His nostrils burned with the smell of burning rubber. 

H usk spread out his wings, giving them a test flap. “Alright, I’m ready for a fly-over if you need it!”

Chay focused her hellphone’s camera towards midtown.  “ Understood! I’ll see if I can get a trace of…”

There was a puff of smoke, and the sound of an explosion reverberated towards Chay’s location.

“I think Cherri may have just intercepted them!”, Chay cried.

Her phone vibrated. Chay looked at the caller ID, but she didn’t recognize the number…

“Hello?”

“ _Good evening, Miss Ong. I am checking in on your progress on behalf of my employer.”_

It was the receptionist from Valentino’s studio.

“Not a good time right now, I’m out in the field as we speak.”

“ _Very good, Miss Ong. Any progress so far?”_

“Tell your boss that I’ve identified the culprits, and am currently tracking them to their hideout. They are on the move as we speak, and I intend to finish this _tonight_.”

“ _Excellent. I shall inform Mr. Valentino immediately.”_

Chay suddenly had a thought. The receptionist had said that he was willing to help her in any way necessary. Perhaps he could….

“Wait! Before you go, I need one small favor.”

“ _Within reason, Miss Ong. How may I be of service?”_

“You control the security cameras around Val’s place, right?”

“ _I have access to them, yes.”_

“Including the ones on the street corner?”

-

Husk’s wings flapped furiously as he hovered over the highway, attempting to stay just out of sight as the Inferna assault vehicle skidded madly down the block.

Cherri was right on their tail. She had managed to chase them all the way from the Red Light District all the way to the central district.

On foot.

And it didn’t look like she was going to run out of breath anytime soon. She was screaming every known profanity known to mankind and hurling a bomb every time she got to within a few feet of the vehicle.

(She was also cursing in her Australian accent, so she was  _ really _ pissed).

Each bomb sent up clouds of dust and smoke, each of which rose up into the air and clouded Husk’s line of sight.

“ _Are you watching them, Husk?”_ , Chay’s voice said over the hellphone.

“Yep, I gotta a bead on them! Cherri ain’t too far behind, though!” Husk squinted his eyes as he tried to keep both Inferna and Cherri in the chaos below.

“But Cherri’s kicking up a lot of debris for me up here, it’s getting’ hard to track ‘em!”

“ _That’s just fine. If we’re lucky she’ll scare them off to where ever they hide. Just try not to lose them”_

“Hold on, it’s looks like they’re stopping…”

The vague outline of the Assault Vehicle came to a slow halt right below Husk, covered in a choking cloud of smoke and dust.

“ _Watch yourself, Husk! They have a minigun on that thing and they might try to use it!”_

T he sound of the vehicle’s engine roared up again. The sound of screeching tires echoes in Husk’s eardrums.

“That’s only if Cherri doesn’t get to them fir-wait, what the fuck?!”

Husk suddenly came to a halt in mid-air….over the now  _ empty _ road.

“ _Husk? What’s wrong?”_

Husk squinted his eyes…..nothing. Other than a cloud of smoke, there was nothing but bare pavement.

“They _…_..they’re gone. Just….gone.”

“ _What are you talking about?”_

“I mean they fucking _vanished_! No Inferna, no nothing!”

The line was silent for a moment.

Then Chay answered:  _ “Where are you right now?” _

“Errr _…_.lemme see….” 

Husk looked around him. About a block away was the familiar facade of Rosie’s Emporium (formally co-owned with the now-erased Franklin), and the neon sign of Klub Kaiju just down the street.

“I’m over the highway about a block away from Rosie’s Emporium.”

“ _Crol, do you know where that is?”_ , Chay asked.

Crol’s voice crackled through.  _ “Yeah, I know where that is! You want me to pick you up on my soup cart?” _

“ _Yeah, but you might want to stow the pots. Husk?”_

“Yeah, I hear ya.”

“ _Hang out somewhere nearby. We’ll be there in a few minutes.”_

* * *

It actually took them half an hour, but Chay and Crol finally made it to Husk’s position, puttering along on Crol’s cart.

Cherri, however, had beaten them to the punch. She was texting on her hellphone as Crol hit the brakes. Husk, surly as ever, was sitting on the crosswalk giving Cherri the stink-eye. Other than the still-visible cloud of smoke, the highway was completely empty.

“This is your fucking fault.”, Husk grunted.

“Mhmmm”, Cherri said nonchalantly as she tapped away on her phone.

“Goddammit, it _is_!”. Husk stood up and stomped his way over to Cherri. “We were actually tracking these fuckers and then you had to go turn the city block into a fucking after-party in Belfast! Now we gotta start back again at square-fucking one!”

Chay was shaking her scarf free of insects and waving the smoke away. “We shouldn’t give up so easy. They disappeared in this general area, so they had to have gone somewhere….”

C rol looked around himself. There was no smoldering craters or blast marks to be seen. “ Awful clean for a bombing... ”

“I ran out about a mile back.”, Cherri said, face still buried in her phone.

Chay pulled out her own hellphone and went through her contacts. “ Cherri, did you see where they went?”

“No, they fucking vanished.”

“That so, huh? Just straight disappeared?”, Husk said, now clearly irritated. “And yet we’re standing in a cloud of smoke caused by one of _your_ bombs!”

“I don’t have any more bombs!”, Cherri shouted as she haphazardly shoved her hellphone back into her pocket. “I told you, I ran out of bombs about a mile back!”

H usk just grunted to himself. “Well….you still fucked up our operation.”. He planted his butt on the ground, his grimace almost turning into a pout.

Chay tapped a button on her phone’s screen. “I got a call a few minutes ago from Val’s receptionist. I asked him to look and see if there was anything unusual he saw in security footage for the building. In the meantime…”

Chay wandered over to Husk. “Husk, stop being a dick.”

Husk stuck his tongue out.

A voice suddenly piped up from Chay’s phone.

“ _Miss Ong?”_

She quickly put the phone up to her ear. “Yes sir, it’s me. Have you found it yet?”

“ _I believe I may have. Your phone is capable of video calls, yes?”_

“You would know, you went through it.”

“ _I know, I just wanted to be polite. Hold for a moment, please.”_

Crol and Husk crowded around Chay and her phone. The screen went blank before the image of Val’s Receptionist appeared. He was sitting in a room that was covered with security screens. Static and dynamic images from security cameras showed footage of the various offices and sound stages in Val’s building (some of which were still in use).

“ _Am I coming through clearly?”_ , he asked.

“Yes, crystal.”, Chay replied.

Husk’s eyes widened. “Wait, I’ve seen this guy in some of Val’s movies!”

Chay raised an eyebrow. “No, this is his receptionist. I met him at the front desk.”

“ _I’ve done other jobs for Mr. Valentino, Miss Ong. Including in front of the camera. But to get to the issue at hand….”_

The image swung around as the Receptionist’s tentacles began tapping away on the security console.

“ _You asked me to inspect the footage over the last two weeks. I intend to tell you the results of my investigation now.”_

“You did all of that in thirty minutes?”

“ _Twenty minutes, actually. I was going to contact you later in the evening. But you will wish to see this...”_

His tentacles tapped one last button.  _ “I’m going to shift my phone’s camera to face the screens in front of me. Please pay attention to what I am about to show you.” _

The Receptionist turned his phone towards the screens. It focused on one particular screen, one that showed an image of the street corner next to Val’s building,  marred by verticle lines in the footage.

“ _You are seeing the image, yes?”_ , the Receptionist’s voice could be heard in the background. _“This is from exactly_ _one month_ _ago,_ _shortly before 5 PM. I shall play the footage now.”_

The video began to play at an accelerated rate. Not much was happening aside from random passersby. One random Sinner was drinking beer from a bottle before tossing it into a nearby garbage can. Another was smoking from a meth pipe. Other than the setting sun and rising Pentagram moon, nothing else of interest was happening.

“Seems pretty normal to me”, Chay replied.

“ _Indeed. This is a normal piece of footage, as it would flow unaltered and undoctored. I have shown you this to compare to the following… ”_

The image on the security screen shifted over to yet another piece of footage. It was still the same street corner, except now the garbage can had been overturned, and a pack of horned rats were digging through the refuse.

“ _This is from a few days after the previous footage, around the time that Mr. Profera disappeared. Please watch.”_

Again, the footage began to play at an accelerated rate. More images of random passersby and Val’s employees walking about or plying their trade. Again, the sun set and the Pentagram Moon rose.

“Looks pretty much the same”, Husk replied.

“ _Do you think so? Please watch again. Pay attention to the moon.”_

The footage played again. Same passersby, same employees, the setting of the sun….but something about the moon rising was off.

“ _Do you see it now?”_

Crol and Husk looked at each other and shrugged.

But Chay saw something odd. Something about the way the moon rose appeared...off.

“Sir, could you please play that last bit back for me?”

“ _Ah, you’ve spotted it as well.”_

The footage rewound to a couple of hours back, then played again.

Everything appeared normal...except for the moon.

“The moon-rise. It’s...rather choppy.”

“ _Indeed it is, Miss Ong. That is because this footage has been tampered with.”_

“Holy shit….”, Husk exclaimed. “You’ve got a fucking mole in your operation!”

“ _That would appear to be the case, yes. This security room is heavily guarded, and only a select few of Mr. Valentino’s employees have access to it. I can access it, of course, as well as Mr. Valentino. A select few of his personal guard also have access. Furthermore, the footage is broadcast over a private channel, which cannot be accessed from the outside. Only one of that number could enter this room, access the security footage, and alter it.”_

T he image in the phone shifted back over to the Receptionist.  _ “As you can now assess, we have experienced a security breach. That is why I decided to go through more footage over the following weeks. I found similar alterations, some of which were very difficult to pinpoint.” _

“Did you find anything?”, Chay asked.

“ _I believe I may have. I wish to show you one more piece of footage…”_

The view shifted back to the security council, only now it was facing a different screen.

“ _This footage was recorded exactly twelve days ago. Watch carefully…”_

Once again, there was the familiar street-corner. The trashcan was now gone,  but the landscape was still the same. More random passersby, more of Valentino’s employees…but this time, Chay was able to immediately see the alteration.

“Someone just vanished into thin air…”

“ _Indeed. A total of fifteen minutes have disappeared from the footage.”_

“That’s a pretty big chunk of time missing.”, Husk answered.

“ _Yes, but their editing was much sloppier this time. I was able to pick up one single still-frame of the unaltered footage before the cut…”_

The footage rewound fifteen minutes in the past, just at the moment the unauthorized editor erased it.

It was the same street corner, and the same backdrop.

Except that now, there was a  large green object floating in the air. An object that swirled in on itself, like a whirlpool in space-time.

It was a portal. A teleportation portal.  Surrounded by a cloud of smoke.

“Holy fucking shit….”, Husk slapped his forehead. “I fucking recognize what that is!”

“ _Indeed, this is very clearly a magic portal. One that uses a very specific spell, from a very specific book, produced by one very specific individual.”_

Chay’s eyes widened. “Overlord Stolas.”

“ _Quite. Mr. Stolas gifted Mr. Valentino one of his magical tomes some time ago. He kept it in his treasure room underneath the building, in a heavily-locked vault that only his most trusted advisors can access.”_

“Where is that book now?”, Chay asked.

“ _Gone. One of the guards reported it stolen to Mr. Valentino some time ago. He decided to send one of his_ _loyalest_ _advisors to find it.”_

_ -One of his loyal est … _

“ _Miss Ong, I believe you now understand what it is I am communicating to you.”_

Chay closed her eyes and took a deep breath. The last piece of the puzzle had finally fallen into place.

“Yes, I do. Thank you very much for your help, sir.”

“ _I should also inform you of something else Miss Ong…”_ , the picture shifted back to face the Receptionist. _“That particular tome did not just include the spell, but it also included a number of adhesive emblems that could be used to trigger a portal.”_

“You mean like stickers?”

“ _Indeed, like stickers. Th_ _is_ _teleportation spell can only be used in two directions, to two locations. If you wish to find your suspects, you will_ _need_ _to find one of those stickers.”_

The Receptionist got up from the chair he was sitting in.

“ _Now then, I’m afraid I must cut our conversation short. I shall inform Mr. Valentino of your progress. Good luck, Miss Ong.”_

He ended the call, and the screen went dark.

* * *

C hay shoved her phone back into her pocket. “Well, that at least explains how they were able to disappear.”

Husk scratched his stomach with his over-sized claws. “ So we  _ are _ back at square one. Fuck!”

“I wouldn’t say that just yet”, Chay said. “They obviously used that teleportation spell somewhere in this general area…”

“Yeah, but _how_ did they use it? Did they have the book with them? One of those stickers?”

C hay glanced around herself. There was still no traffic; apparently any potential drivers had been scared off by the chaos of Inferna and Cherri’s indiscriminate bombing. Although visible damage could be seen in the distance, there was no cracked pavement or debris to speak of  in the general vicinity . 

There was, however, a pair of skid marks on asphalt...a pair of skid marks that came to a sudden halt, as if cut off  in mid-smear.

“Well, this all but confirms that they used that spell here”. Chay bent down to get a closer look at the marks. The marks ended in a perfect line, as if they had run up against a solid wall. “It’s perfectly symmetrical.”

“Meaning?”, asked Husk.

Chay looked up at Husk incredulously.

“Oh for fuck’s sake….you were in Vietnam, right Husk? Think about it: You’re in the jungle, and you see some foot prints that suddenly stop. Why do you think that is?”

“….Because the VC laid a tiger trap.”

“And a tiger trap is like a….?” Chay said, rolling her hands and trying to egg Husk on to the correct answer.

Husk closed his eyes and thought for a moment.

“….A portal.”

“Exactly! _”_

“It’s like someone ripped up some painter’s tape after a fresh coat.”, Crol remarked. 

“That still doesn’t answer how they summoned the portal”, Husk said. He reached into his collar and produced his flask, which was somehow completely full again.

Chay stood back up, brushing off her knees. “You said they skidded to a halt before they disappeared, right Husk?”

“Yeah, for like a nanosecond before they floored the pedal”. He tipped the flask up and gulped loudly.

“So they stopped briefly, and then accelerated before vanishing. Why do you think that is?”

H usk shoved the flask back into his collar before belching loudly. 

“I dunno….to use the spell?”

“Yes, but if they had the book in their possession, wouldn’t they have been able to use the spell while still driving? Instead, they had to stop the car for a brief moment while our one-eyed friend over there was throwing explosives powerful enough to blast their vehicle off of the highway.”

Husk’s bloodshot eyes suddenly widened. “Fuck me….one of those stickers is around here somewhere!”

“Yes, exactly!”

‘ _Jesus wept but this guy is dense’_ , Chay said to herself.

Crol, meanwhile, was walking along the highway’s guardrail, peering down at the ground below.

He poked his head through the median rails to get a closer look. Much like the highway above them, it was a ghost town. It was getting close to sundown, and the empty roadway made it seem even more apocalyptic then what was usual for this part of Hell.

Then, something caught his eye. Something that was actually stuck behind one of the median rails, towards the base, almost touching the asphalt.

“Hey Chay!”, Crol called. “Any idea what one of these stickers might look like?”

Chay crossed her arms in thought. “That’s...actually a pretty good question. We know it’s one of Stolas’s items...does Stolas have some kind of calling card?”

“Something like an owl face, maybe? Or something with a crown?”, Crol answered back.

Husk shrugged his shoulders. “That would be my best guess. Guy is kinda vain…”

Chay nodded. “Yeah, it would probably have to be something that could be directly tied to him. Why?”

Crol peered to his left, behind the median rail. There was a small brown circle, with the caricatured face of an owl, wearing a crown.

And it was  _ glowing _ .

“Yeah, I think I did! Behind the guardrail!”

C hay and Husk ran over to where Crol was bent over, head shoved between the median rails. Cherri, meanwhile, wandered gingerly over, still texting away as if oblivious to the world around her.

Chay got down on her knees and bent over the guard rail, next to Crol. Holding her scarf to her face, she slumped over the rail and peered at the other side, her hair falling over her cheek.

She nodded. “Yes...that appears rather Stolas-y. But how do we activate it?”

Husk piped up. “Touch it, I guess.”

Chay looked over shoulder at Husk. “That seems a little too simple. Don’t they usually bind these kind of spells to the user, or something like that?”

Husk grinned and shook his head. “If that were the case, then they wouldn’t be able to use it. They said it was a gift to Val, right? So either Val never bothered to bind it to himself, or it could be used by anybody else.”

“That makes….a lot of sense, actually. You can figure out that much but you couldn’t figure out the portal…”

“Hey! I heard that!”

“I know you did, that was the point.” Chay reached over the rail and placed her hand near the sticker. It radiated warmth, and her fingers tingled.

“OK...I’m going to try and activate it. Everybody stand clear!”

Chay sucked in breath through her teeth, and slapped her hand over the emblem.

The sound of an explosion, like a sonic boom, assaulted her ears. The air filled with smoke, seeping into her nose hole and through the fabric of her scarf, nearly choking her.

“Holy fucking shit!”, Husk cried over the noise. “There it is!”

Chay looked back over her shoulder. Hanging in the middle of the air, within the smoke, was a glowing green portal, over three meters high, swirling into itself like a whirlpool.

She took her hand of the sticker. The portal hung in the air, still swirling and smokey, for roughly fifteen seconds.

Then it disappeared again.

“That’s it. We actually fucking found it!”. Husk jumped up and down with excitement. “We can finally end this bullshit!”

Chay stood back up, wiping dust off of her knees. “Yeah, but we don’t exactly know where it leads to. It could lead to their HQ, or it could lead to another rally point.”

“But it’s the best fuckin’ chance we have! For fuck’s sake Chay, that sonic boom may have already alerted them to our presence!”

The Hungry Ghost girl sighed to herself. She reached into her pocket, feeling for her gun.

The cylinder was fully loaded, and the dagger was sharpened.

This might be their one opportunity.

Chay nodded. “Alright, fine. You have a point. But we’re flying blind here, so I’m gonna need you on defense, understood?”

Husk’ s grin almost reached his ears. His wings stretched out and flapped against the warm air. His claws bend to extend and glisten from his hands.

“Oh yeah, I’m ready to fuck some shit up!”

“Fantastic. Crol?”

Crol pulled his head out from between the rails and looked up at Chay. “Yeah?”

“You’ve helped us this far. I’ve got one more thing I need you to do.”

The kobold-demon puffed out his chest proudly. “Yeah, Chay?”

“I’m gonna need you to remain here, and keep your ‘cart running. You might end up being our get-away if it comes to it.”

He nodded. “Understood. I’ll text you if anything happens on this side.”

Chay bent back down over the guardrail.

“Alright, I’m fixing to reactivate the portal! We only got about fifteen seconds before it deactivates again, so be prepared!”

“Got it!”, Husk answered.

Chay slapped her hand over the sticker again. Another sonic boom thundered, and smoke once again choked the air.

Chay jumped back up to her feet and ran towards the portal. “In we go!”

She jumped through the portal head first, disappearing on the other side. Husk, claws bared and wings flapping, flew in behind her.

Fifteen seconds later, the portal closed once again, leaving only one kobold-demon, a block of un-molested highway, and miles of cracked asphalt heading towards town.

Crol looked around himself.

“….Cherri? You still there?”


	13. Revelations And Retribution

The first thing they heard when they emerged was singing.

Really  _ bad _ singing.

After having flowed through whatever exists in a warp in space-time, Chay and Husk emerged into an enormous garage. The walls were brick (and was badly in need of re-grouting), and the floor was dirty, scuffed concrete scarred with rubber marks, scratches, cracks and gouges. Around them were various make-shift tables, filled with various papers, chemicals and cardboard boxes. The Assault Vehicle, the one they had tailed to this location, was  haphazardly parked near the corner of the room, its chassis dusty and covered in blast marks. The mini-gun, which had terrorized the denizens of the West Side, laid limp and impotent, crooked on it’s base.

H usk whipped his head around, somewhat disappointed. “Well fuck, I thought I was gonna get the claws wet.”

Chay whispered in a hushed tone. “You still just might, but we need to do a little reconnaissance. What do we have as far as entrances and exists go?”

“Lemme see…”

Husk and Chay took in the rest of the garage.  The only possible exits were a door, and what appeared to be a vent, from which the terrible singing was coming from.

“I’m gonna guess that the door only leads to another part of the hideout. The vent, however, seems to lead to wherever they’re torturing cats.”

“I’m pretty sure that’s singing.”, Chay replied.

“You can call it whatever you want”, Husk said while scratching his ear. “It’s still fuckin murder.”

Chay reached into her pocket and produced her gun. She folded the knuckle-duster grip into the gun’s body, and folded out the dagger.  She stuck her fingers through the rings, and gripped.

“Then our only option is the door. We’re still flying blind however…”

Husk grinned and giggled to himself, nodding.

“...What are you laughing at, Husk?”

“Nuthin’...just impressed.” Husk flexed his claws. “You really do know your shit. A rookie would have suggested the vent.”

Chay looked up at the vent. “Why would I choose the vent? Even if we could fit through it, at best it would lead to a duct, and those collapse under the smallest amount of weight. We’d fall right into the line of fire. Why would anyone attempt that?”

“Why, indeed. But before we go in, I wanna check something…”

Husk walked over to the banged-up Assault Vehicle. He peered into the dark windowshield.

“Looking for something?”

“I wanna check and see if it’s unlocked. They might have something in there that could help us”

Husk walked over to the driver’s side door and jiggled the handle. The door popped over, easily.

“Wanna have a look?”

Chay tip-toed over to the vehicle and peered inside. The inside of the vehicle was cramped, but serviceable, with seats for both the driver and a passenger, as well as a couple of makeshift benches in the back for transporting additional troops. There was also small ladder that led up to the hatch that opened up to the mini-gun.

On the passenger side seat, was a small piece of parchment.

Chay reached in and  grabbed the item, careful not to drop or tear it . It was somewhat brittle, but still stable e nough to have been folded in half like a greeting card.

She looked at Husk and grinned. “Care to guess what’s in here?”

Husk smirked. “Easy. It’s what they used to get here.”

She opened up the parchment. Inside were several stickers resembling the one they found on the highway: a brown circle with an image of an owl head wearing a crown. She counted nine in total...but there were also indentations in the paper that suggested a sticker had previously been there.  All in all, there were roughly t hirteen stickers originally.

“They’ve obviously already used a couple.”, Husk said.

“One of which was on the highway, and another….”

They both looked back at where they had appeared in the garage: Stuck on the wall, towards the floor, was what was unmistakably a similar sticker...although it was worn and faded in places.

“Wonder where the other two are…”, Husk said as he scratched his chin.

“No idea. And I don’t intend to wait around to find out.”

They both turned around to face the door.

Husk stretched out his wings, and ground his teeth. “OK, you wanna breach the door or your want me to do it?”

“I’m on point. If we walk into anything, back me up.”

Husk nodded. “Understood. Let’s do this.”

The two Sinner s quietly walked to the door. Chay chanced the handle- it was locked tight.

“Locked?”

Chay nodded. “Yeah. Let me get my lockpick.”.

Chay rummaged around in her pockets, looking for her skeleton key.

It wasn’t there.

“Shit.”

“Don’t worry, I got this.”

Husk stepped in front of her and extended one of his claws. He stuck it into the keyhole and fingered the mechanism inside.

One minute later, and the lock clicked open.

Chay raised an eyebrow, impressed. “Nice. Can’t be easy to pick a lock with a claw like that.”

“Oh, I didn’t pick the lock. I just stuck it in there and broke it. You still on point?”

Chay put her hand on the door handle, gripping the Apache.

“Yeah. Get ready…”

Husk flexed his wings, working his grin into a snarl.

“Three….two…..one…..here we go.”

Chay opened the door  slowly, peering through the crack in the door before opening it completely.

It was a dusty, L-shaped hallway, with dripping pipes and a dirty bucket of mop water against the wall (complete with mop). It curved around to the left, to possibly another door.

“Dammit!”, Husk grunted to himself. “Why you gotta get me all riled up like that?”

“Don’t get comfortable yet, we might still be walking into a horde of assholes.”

Chay tip-toed through the door and down the hall, peering around the corner. There was a bulletin board tacked to the right wall that was covered with papers and a calendar, next to another door. This door, however, had a window, which opened on to a flight of stairs.

The Sinners slowly walked around the corner, tip-toeing to the door.

“Chay!”, whispered Husk, looking at the calendar. “Take a look at this!”

Chay took a glance at the calendar. It was fairly busy, with several notes on days about things like luncheons, ‘poetry’ readings, ‘group meet’...and raids.

Including raids for the last two weeks.

“Fucking poetry readings? Bunch of fuckin’ dweebs.”, Husk giggled to himself.

Chay peered through the door’s window again, looking at the staircase.

“Looks like we’re going up a floor…”She jiggled the door-handle. It was also unlocked.

_-Are these guys really this incompetent?_

Chay walked through the door, followed by Husk.

They began to climb...

* * *

_**(From the Night Before)** _

“So what do you know about World War I?”, Viola asked into Lucius’s phone. She was sitting at the Imp’s desk, typing with one hand on Lucius’s laptop while chewing away at a piece of pockie between her teeth.

“ _The basics, I guess.”_ , the Hungry Ghost girl answered on the other end of the line. _“I know that it started because someone shot Archduke Ferdinand, that started some scuffle with the Austro-Hungarians and the Germans_ _with Serbia_ _, which in turn pissed off the French and the British._ _The Russians and Italians got involved,_ _and then everyone started killing each other in trenches_ _with mustard gas_ _.”_

Viola raised an eyebrow. “Your grasp on the timeline is a little mixed...but yeah, that’s the long and short of it. Anyway, it was a catastrophic conflict and basically wounded everyone involved who didn’t die. Some of those people would then have a hand in starting the sequel.”

“ _Hitler and Mussolini, yes.”_

“You also probably know about the other big thing that happened towards the end of the war, the thing that got Russia out of it.”

“ _You mean the October Revolution?”_

“Right, and that ended up triggering a bunch of similar uprisings and coups all over Europe and Asia.”

“ _It also plunged Russia into a bloody civil war. The events of that era would reverberate all the way to my country many years later.”_

“Yeah, but we’re getting off track….”

Viola pressed a button on her mousepad, enlarging a picture on the screen. It was a photograph of a human:  bald, with a prominent nose, intense eyes,  a curled  mustache and a pointy beard.

“Like I said, after the war ended a bunch of the veterans went back to their home countries, wounded and a little on edge. You already mentioned Hitler and Mussolini, but there was another Italian involved as well.”

She clicked on the photograph again. It led to an encyclopedic article on the figure in question, and an additional photo of him in military garb.

“He was pretty famous back then. A very successful writer and poet, and a massive publicity hog. He wrote several novels, plays, but mostly he was known for his poetry. Critics at the time called him the greatest Italian poet since Dante.”

She bit into the pockie, breaking it off in her teeth while holding the remainder between her fingers.

“Guess what nickname they gave him.”

“ _I can only guess.”_

“They called him _Il Profeta_ , the Prophet.”

“ _Fun.”_

“He was also a massive poon hound. He was a master seducer who would fuck and leave several women over his lifetime. He fathers dozens of illegitimate children and refused to have anything to do with them. He would give speeches on balconies, and screaming fan girls would crowd around under him on the off chance they might get sprayed with his drool.”

“ _That….is some intense fandom.”_

“He was also absolutely obsessed with his home country of Italy. A serious patriot, to an irrational measure. So when Italy entered the war in 1914, he gave speeches in favor of Italy’s entry. He even joined the Italian military and became a fighter pilot. He returned home after the war as not only a man of letters, but as a war hero. He even managed to die of old age, in a mansion, with the reputation of a demigod.”

“ _Quite a life.”_

“Yeah, but it isn’t over yet. This is the part you’re going to want to pay attention to…”

-

The voices were getting louder.

Husk and Chay had climbed an unusually long flight of stairs, one that actually climbed up a few stories. But as they climbed, the noise they had heard coming from the vent in the garage returned, and it was getting louder as they climbed.

“Sounds like they’re having a rally.”, Husk whispered.

“That...might be a problem.”, Chay replied, breathing heavily. “It might make a good distraction, but if we’re gonna end this tonight, we’ll be surrounded.”

“Let’s not give up yet, Chay. Let’s see where these stairs lead us.”

“Easy for you to say.”, Chay replied, almost out of breath. “You don’t have to walk up this shit…”

Husk gently hovered behind her, his wings flapping as he practically floated up the stairs.

“This still takes a lot of energy, you know.”

Chay looked up above her. There was only one more series of stairs to go.

“Hold on….let’s stop a second…”

Chay nearly collapsed onto the top step, with Husk gently landing next to her. She wasn’t usually this easily winded, but for some reason it seemed difficult to breath here.

It was also warmer than usual.

“Is it just me, or….”

“Naw, I feel it to.”, Husk replied. “Maybe the air is just thin here, or something is eating up all of the oxygen.”

Chay wiped sweat from her forehead. “But whatever it is, we’re getting close.”

Husk looked up at the door. “Yeah, we are. What’s the plan?”

Chay closed her eyes for a moment.

“It looks like that door has another window. We’ll need to get a look inside before we enter….but I have no idea if anyone is guarding it or not.

Husk flapped his wings.

“Hold on, I’ll hover up there and see if I can look inside…”

Husk flew up to the top of the stairs, his wings making gentle wind. He hovered next to the door, and peered through the window.

He was right, there was definitely a huge rally happening. The room inside was enormous, and it was filled with hundreds of Inferna members, all wearing their signature black uniforms and gas masks. They were all watching an enormous stage, on which was two enormous torches blazing at full heat, in front of a backdrop that featured Inferna’s emblem in enormous display: The Ouroborus, around a red disc, with the Big Dipper once again in the center.

And on that stage, gathered together and struggling to sing  _ something _ , were various female Sinners of  of every size and sub-species of demon. All of them looked tired, exhausted, over-worked...and scared. They all wore identical choir robes of pitch black. And not a single one of them could sing properly.

Husk motioned to Chay. “You’ll wanna see this!”, he whispered.

She tip-toed up the steps, mostly recovered from the climb, and peered into the window.

“That’s them!”, she whispered. “That’s the rest of Val’s girls! I’m also certain of it!”

The ‘song’ finally came to an end. The girls were ‘ushered’ off of the stage (at spear point) and behind the curtain. One of the Inferna members (a pudgy Sinner with a paunch) walked up on to the stage, with a snare drum strapped to its gut and a pair of drumsticks gripped in his hand. 

“Ahem. Attention, brothers!”

The rest of the Inferna stood fast at attention.

“The Prophet shall emerge to speak with us shortly. Before he does, let us repeat the Oath of Silence, as we always should, and always shall, until his visage rules over all of Hell. Salute!”

The pudgy Inferna stretched out his arm, presenting his hand in an upward facing salute. The rest of the Infena immediately followed suit.

“Brothers! Repeat after me! ‘As a soldier of the Inferna brotherhood….’ ”

“As a soldier of the Inferna brotherhood…”, they repeated in chorus.

“I hereby swear upon my damned soul…”

“ _I hereby swear upon my damned soul…”_

“To hold the Prophet and his works sacred…”

“ _To hold the Prophet and his works sacred…”_

Back behind the door, Husk floated gently down back to Chay. “ This might be our chance. Should we go in there?”

She stood up, gripping the Apache in her hand. “We’ll be surrounded in there, you know.”

Husk shook his head. “Don’t worry, if all goes to shit I have a back-up plan.”

Chay raised an eyebrow. “ _ You _ have a backup plan?” 

“Yeah, though I’d rather not have to use it if I don’t have to.”

“Hopefully we won’t have to.”. She climbed up the last few stairs before getting to the door. Her hand rested on the door-handle.

“I’m on point. Follow me…”

Chay slowly and quietly opened the door, opening it to the barest amount necessary to sneak in. Husk slowly followed behind her.

“…..And have my tongue severed and shoved into my arse.”

“….. _And have my tongue severed and shoved into my arse.”_

T he two Sinners tip-toed as quietly as they could, sweat beading on their brows from the intense heat of the stage’s storches. The entire room was sweltering. How any of the Inferna they were quietly sneaking behind could stand it was beyond Chay’s understanding.

“Et Suit Inferna!”

“ _Et Suit Inferna!”_

The Inferna drummer then gripped his drumsticks in both hands, and began to patter out a steady beat.

“Now then, brothers. Let us welcome with great joy, the future leader of Hell, whom we shall serve for all time, as Hell shall serve us!”

The Inferna members erupted in cheers.

The curtain slowly opened.

Slithering out from behind it, was the individual they had been calling The Prophet. The source of Chay’s problems for the last three days, and the thorn in the side of Valentino, Cherri, and the resident’s of Pentagram City’s west side.

The Sinner was a green snake-demon, with a curled moustache, pointed beard, militant costume, an officer’s cap sporting a feather, and a rose on his lapel.

“Brothers in fire!”, the Prophet began, with a deeply noticable Italian accent.

“I come before you a man of vision! A man of principals! A man who strives for greatness, as you yourselves strive!”

“That’s him! Viola was right!”, Chay whispered to Husk.

“Isn’t that the other guy you’ve been…”

“Yes! It’s Profera!” Chay pulled out her phone and swiped through her apps, finding the photo album.

The Prophet continued his speech.

“Brothers! You are not blind, as I am not blind! You have born witness to the corruption, the decadence and weakness of those who claim to rule this Inferno of Suffering! Those who seek to pick the bones off its rotting corpse! Those who cavort with women who seek power, with effeminate men and degenerate peoples who poison our world with their degeneracy! You have seen the dandies who rule in their palaces, nary raising a finger in battle! Yet we are supposed to serve them, to toady to their bloated existence?”

“No!”, the members of Inferna chanted.

“Is not Hell meant to be ruled by the strong? The brave? The daring?”

“Yes!”

“Does not fortune favor the bold? Is it not the right of the strong to rule?”

“Yes!”

“And I thought ‘Pentious was bad”, Husk grunted to himself.

“Do you consecrate youself to this divine cause, brothers?!”

“Yes!”

“Shall we go forth, and conquer?!”  
  
“YES!”

“Shall we topple the House of Magne, and rule all of Hell?!”

“ _YES!”_

Chay couldn’t help but giggle to herself.

Viola had been 100% right.

“What’s so fuckin’ funny, Chay?”, Husk asked.

“He’s exactly as Viola described him, Husk.” she answered. “This is...”

* * *

_**(From the Night Before)** _

Viola clicked on another link, bringing her to a rather unusual flag.

“After the war ended in 1919, the Allied Powers started divvying up territory between themselves. One of the places in questions was a city called Fiume, which was located in what is now Croatia. It was culturally Italian, but it was attached to the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes. As you can imagine for a lunatic patriot, this was something he could not tolerate.”

“ _I would imagine.”_

“Now here is where it gets pretty incredible: the guy decides that someone should invade and conquer Fiume for Italy. So, he gets a few thousand ex-soldiers to rally around him...and he invades and conquers Fiume. Just like that.”

“ _Wow.”_

“Not only that, but he actually makes himself dictator of the city, crowning himself as Il Duce. He basically starts an entire mini-state that’s like a libertine prototype of Fascism. He ruled the place for over a year before the Italian Navy shelled the city and forced him to flee back to Italy. They also had a flag especially for them, and an official seal…”

She clicked on the flag, and routed it to Chay’s hellphone.

“I’m sending you an image for your hellphone. It should be getting there in a second.”

“ _OK, it’s coming….whoa.”_

“Look familiar?”

“ _It’s the fucking emblem of Inferna!”_

“Ouroborus, red circle, big dipper. The very same. Now you wanna bet who this Prophet person is?”

“ _It has to be this guy...whoever he is. It’s a man, right? What is his name?”_

“Hold on, I need to send you one more image. It’s his photograph.”

The Imp clicked on the photograph one more time, sending it to Chay.

“You’ll want to save that picture. His name was….”

* * *

“…Gabrielle D’Annunzio.”, Chay whispered. “She was right.”

T here was no mistaking it. The Sinner on the stage giving his fiery speech may have been a snake-demon now, but it was definitely him.  The accent, the moustache and beard, the theatricality and ego, the obsession with spectacle...it was definitely him. The Sinner who Valentino knew as Profera was in fact the source of all of this mess, and had managed to convince enough Sinners to follow his lead.

“I dunno, Chay…..something is bothering me.”

Chay began folding the knuckle duster grip back into it’s position. She opened the cylinder and checked the ammunition: it was fully loaded, and the Exterminator bullet was the first in the chamber.

“What’s that, Husk?”, she whispered in return.

“It’s just…..doesn’t this seem too easy?”

Chay re-chambered the Apache and put the gun back into her pocket. “How so?”

“Well….think about it. We haven’t encountered a single locked door since we came in here. Not a single alarm, or a guard standing duty…”

“I assumed they were just grossly incompetent, but I think I see what you mean….”

“It’s just…why are they making all of this so obvi-”

Husk suddenly shut up, eyes facing forward.

“Yeah….why is it so obvious? Either they really are that terrible or…”

“….We knew you were here the whole time, morons.”

Chay’s blood ran cold. She slowly turned her head around, looking over her shoulder.

Standing behind them, holding an Exterminator spear pointed directly at them, was the short Inferna member with the metal cuirass  and the distortion mask.

“But of course we knew they were here, Liutenant!”

Profera hopped down from off the stage and slithered across the room. The members of Inferna slowly parted as he made his way between them.

“We knew they were here the moment they entered our garage! No one could ignore a sonic boom _that_ loud!”

The snake-demon stopped in front of Chay.

“So you must be the dirt-grubber whom that degenerate Valentino hired. I must give you some praise, for you certainly needed skills to get this far.”

He signaled to the Liutenant. “Retrieve her weapon if you would.”

The stocky short Sinner reached into her pockets, feeling around for the Apache. His hand emerged gripping it’s knuckle duster grip.

“I’ve found it, my Prophet.”

“Good. Bring it here, that I might look upon it.”

Husk looked like he wanted to throw up. This shit was just  _ too corny _ .

The Liutenant handed the weapon to Profera. He rotated the weapon in his hand, fascinated by it.

“Such an unusual firearm. So many diverse parts, all brought together to create one whole. How….poetic.”, he hissed.

Chay shook her head. “You are so fucking two-faced. Every fucking person I talked to at Valentino’s studio found you an annoying shit...but all of them called you loyal. To a fault, even.”

Profera laughed and shook his head mockingly. “Oh, but I  _ do _ believe in loyalty, my little dirt-grubber! I was loyal to Valentino for many years. Decades! But did he ever return the favor? Did he ever acknowledge my inherent greatness? No! Not once! Not a single, solitary  _ instance _ did he ever  acknowledge that I was anywhere  _ close _ to his equal!”

The snake-demon grinned. “But then I found a higher calling, something that was  _ worthy _ of my loyalty! Something that could give me a taste of what I knew in life!”

He slithered up to Chay, extending his neck towards her. His face halted mere inches from hers.

“A cause. A _righteous_ cause. One far greater and more immaculate than Valentino could ever hope for!”

Chay looked  over at Husk. His eyes were closed and he was grinding his teeth.

P rofera turned around and began slithering away. “But now, our tale ends here. So beautiful, and so tragic...like all great tales do.”

The Liutenant poked Chay’s back with the Exterminator spear. The point was cold, and sharp. It also burned slightly, like an electrical shock.

“And like the best of tales….it ends with lots of bloodshed.”

“It ain’t over yet, shit heel!”

_-...The fuck?_

Chay, Husk, Profera, the Liutenant, and everyone else in the room’s eyes darted to the front of the room towards the  source of the  sudden, vulgar shout.

On the stage, in it’s center, juggling a lit cherry bomb between her hands, was the one person that had managed to put Inferna on the offensive.

Cherri. The one person more theatrical than they.

“Finally fucking found you assholes!”

The cherry bomb flew from her hand, towards the center of the room.

Profera’s eyes widened as he followed the bomb’s trajectory.

It was heading straight for him.

“Brothers! Attend me!”

The Inferna surrounded their prophet, quickly locking arms and providing a living shield between Cherri and him.

But he wasn’t going to trust his life solely to them.

The snake-demon reached to his lapel, and ripped the rose off.

Chay and Husk both watched in horror….

It was one of the brown teleportation stickers.

Which meant….

“Husk! Hold on!”

The feline-demon wrapped his wings around the both of them as the bomb bounced to the center of the room.

Profera smacked his chest, activating the sticker.

A loud, enormous sonic boom filled the room, which was then choked with smoke. The floor beneath them slowly morphed into an enormous, green swirl.

There was nothing but shouts, noise and chaos as they fell into space-time.

-

_ - This is how my world ends. Not with a bang, but with a… _

***thud***

Chay wasn’t sure if it was the sound of her head bouncing off of the ground, or just the impact of the fall itself, but it hurt all the same. Her vision was blurry, and her lungs were full of dust as she came to.

“Hus-”, she attempted to say, but instead came up with a chest-scraping cough as her body ejected stray dust particles from her trachea. There was a warm wind blowing through the air, and the first things she could see was a series of cliffs.

Red cliffs. With what looked like a skyline in the near-distance.

The Hungry Ghost girl slowly and awkwardly got to her feet. She wasn’t sure if she had a concussion, but she certainly felt like something had exploded in her head…

She heard a light groaning nearby.

“Fuuuuuccckkk this…”

Husk slowly got to his feet, wiping dust and grime from his fur and wings.

“Dammit, this like the absolute bitch of hangovers….where the fuck are we?”

Chay hugged herself, trying to keep herself together as the impact continued to rock her.  Her teeth were still rattling.

“We’re in the wasteland, Husk. Just outside the city.”

Husk glanced over at the skyline and sighed.

“Shit, that’s going to be a long flight…”

“Wake up, you fools! They are still out there!”, shouted an annoyed voice.

Husk and Chay looked in the direction of the voice. It was coming from just over a sandy hilltop to their left.

The two Sinners looked at each other. Neither said anything in response. They simply nodded, and began climbing the hill.

On the other side was a scene that was both chaotic and comical:

Several Inferna members were still out cold, sawing wood on the wasteland sands. Others were slowly coming to, rubbing their masked heads as they, too, had to deal with the aftermath of their escape.

Some, however, were completely  recovered (if a lot dustier then they had been). They were standing in a circle, as if hypnotized by the display they were witnessing…

In the center of the group, was Profera. His uniform was soiled and disheveled, and his cap was torn and sans-feather. His head whipped around wildly, screaming at the top of his lungs to anyone who would listen.

Compared to the commanding presence of before, he looked absolutely  _ pathetic _ .

But whatever metaphorical spell he had over his men still worked...because once his eyes found them, he immediately went into command mode.

“There they are, Brothers!”, he stabbed his finger in their direction. “Attack!”

Chay slowly backed away, her hands fiddling madly in her pockets for a weapon...until she remembered that Profera had taken it.

“God fucking dammit!”, she shouted to herself.

“Yer tellin’ me, Chay!”, Husk shouted at her. “We are in some serious shit!”

“What do you…” she attempted to say, as her eyes slowly widened in shock. Husk, who was directly behind her, was rendered completely speechless.

There were more of them.

The Inferna members over the hill were only a small contingent of their numbers.

Around them, climbing over the cliffs and emerging from out of the sand, were other Inferna. Like a well-oiled machine, they slowly and methodically began to  surround them. They began drawing their daggers from their sheaths, and clutching them in gloved hands.

Each dagger glinted slightly at the tip...the telltale sign of Exterminator material. They were no longer playing around.

Both Sinners slowly backed into each other, their backs pressed together as the proverbial noose seemed to tighten.

Chay looked back towards Profera.

He was no longer making speeches, or shouting orders, or anything else. He had one of the Inferna daggers clutched between his teeth, and he slithered slowly forward, with other Inferna henchman bearing down on them alongside him.

If they didn’t think of something fast, they were well and truly  _ fucked _ .

“Husk...you know that ‘back-up plan’ you told me about?”

Husk slowly looked over his shoulder at Chay.

“Oh no, Chay….”

“Husk, we don’t have any other choice. It’s now or never. So whatever it is you’re planning, then _do it!_ ”

“Chay…”

Husk slowly turned around to face her. His eyes were pleading, and his ears were drooping.

“Chay…..do I really have to?”

You could have heard a pin drop.

It seemed to even stun the Inferna. They immediately stopped what they were doing, and began looking at each other quizzically. One even shrugged.

“Husk, what the fuck?”

“Please don’t make me do this, Chay! I don’t want to have to owe that guy _another_ fucking favor!”

Chay was incredulous. She waved her arms around wildly, completely confused and a tad infuriated.

“Husk! What the fuck are you on about?! We’re about to be Julius Caesar in the middle of a fucking Shakespeare in the Park massacre, and you’re fucking _complaining_?!”

Husk looked around before tapping the tips of his index finger claws together. “….Maybe we could trying running again?”

“ **HUSK!** ”

The feline-demon smacked himself in the forehead. “Alright, fine! Goddammit but I tried to warn you…”

Husk reached into his collar and produced...a hellphone?

“Just gimme a sec. Hope he picks up…”

He tapped some of the numbers on the key pad. The sound of a ringtone could be heard from the other end.

Chay raised an eyebrow. “….You um….”

“Hold on, he kind of likes the sound of his own ringtone…”

The ringtone rang out through the silent wasteland, with only the warm winds and the confused stares of Inferna as it’s companion.

Profera simply looked annoyed. He ripped the dagger out of his mouth and hissed. “Attack, goddammit!”

None of the Inferna moved.

“I don’t know, my liege.” The cuirassed Inferna known as the Lieutenant emerged from behind Profera. “This looks quite humorous. Comedy is it’s own art form, after all.”

A squeaky voiced Inferna spoke up from among the ranks. “Yeah, I kinda want to see where this is going…”

Profera simply  screeched in anger. “Oh for fuck’s sake!” 

Suddenly, the dial tone ended, an d the sound of the line being picked up could be heard.

What emerged from the other end was a...surprisingly cheerful voice.

Though it was a little...crackly.

“ _Husker, my good man!”_ , said the voice on the other side. _“Good of you to call! I was just speaking with Charlie about the arrangements with the contractor….”_

“Eh...not a good time, Al. We’re in a bit of a jam…”

“ _Oh, I see. Well then, I certainly can’t ignore a friend in peril! Of course, you will pay it forward at a later time…”_

Husk shook his head, rolling his eyes. “I know the deal, Al. You need our coordinates or anything?”

A sudden loud crack resounded throughout the wasteland, as if the universe itself had broken open. A large, yellow opening split open in the air, emitting an acrid, sulfuric smell. A bone-rattling roar came from within it.

“ _No need.”_

* * *

What emerged from the crack was...difficult for Chay to comprehend.

It was black, pitch inky black. It was slimey, and the light of the almost-set sun gave it a bloody red sheen. The sickly glow from the portal also reflected off of it’s scales (if they could even be called scales).

It also had eyes. Lots of eyes. Eyes within eyes. Eyes covering other eyes, which in turn sprouted more eyes. There were also tentacles. And arms. And tentacle-like arms.

And it had a mouth. A cavernous, dripping, acidic maw that slowly opened up, splitting into more jaws than any rationally-evolved creature should feature.

And then it roared.

It dove down from its portal, both slithering in air and cracking like crumbled bone. It dove down into the sand of the wasteland, creating yet another portal with it’s impact. It began to slither...almost swim...in whatever space it inhabited outside of their realm, before it re-emerged with it’s horrifying mouth wide open.

Whatever shock the Inferna were suffering from finally broke. They began screaming at the top of their lungs, and they ran.

But there was no fleeing this…thing.

It simply swooped down upon them, mouth open, and ate them. No chewing of any kind, or biting. It simply swallowed them whole. No matter where they ran, it re-emerged from out of the Outer Dark it existed in, to simply swallow up another group of Inferna.

There was simply nowhere to run.

It rose up into the air, releasing a sound so fouly screeching and roaring that Chay’s ears began to  _ bleed _ . 

Lightning crackled through Hell’s sky. Even the Pentagram Moon, which was just starting to show itself in Hell’s night, seemed dwarfed by this... _ thing _ .

Then, it plunged down into the ground, hurling itself into the desert floor. It dragged sand, rocks, bones and random Inferna along with it.

Then, nothing. Just a hole in the ground….

The massive cleft it left behind seemed to flicker and smoke with some infernal malice.

Chay and Husk stared ahead, blankly.

“ _Good enough?”_

Husk slowly lifted the hellphone to his ear. “Yeah….yeah, that’s good enough.”

“ _Wonderful! Looks like I left one behind, however….but no matter! Pursuing him should be very entertaining! Ta ta!”_

He hung up. Husk pressed the ‘hang-up’ button and put the phone back in his collar.

“So….”

Chay looked over at Husk. “That was your...plan?”

“Yeah. Tried to warn you.”

She nodded slowly. “Yeah….yeah, you did.”

The sound of shifting sand and cursing snapped them to attention. As they both looked over to their right, they could see the lone individual that  _ abomination _ had decided to spare.

Profera, holding a shattered arm, desparately attempted to slither away. His mouth was bleeding, and his uniform was almost completely gone.

Chay looked down at her feet. A metallic glint caught her attention…

Half-burined in the sand, was a small gun. A revolver, with a dagger stuck out into the air.

It was the Apache.

“Um….Chay? He’s getting away…”, Husk said.

Chay bent down and retrieved the fire arm. She shook off the sand from the metal, and dug the remaining sand out of the short barrel.

“No. No he isn’t…”

She cocked the hammer on the gun.

She shouted: “Hey, Gabriele!”

Profera stopped cold. His head slowly turned around to face her. His left eye was almost completely gone, but his remaining eye showed nothing but mad, burning hate.

Chay gave him the bird. “Italy sucks.”

Profera screeched at the top of his lungs. He charged down the dune he was climbing and ran towards her. The fangs in his mouth dripped with fury.

She aimed the gun at his stomach.

And she fired.

The Exterminator bullet struck him squarely in his scaley pelvis. The impact erupted bone, blood and organ tissue from his back, and splattered against a nearby desert rock.

The snake-demon collapsed, still.

Chay sighed, exhaling loudly like a suffocated whale finally getting a hit of oxygen.  Hours of stress seemed to evaporate.

Husk walked up next to her. “Goddamn…”

He looked at the Hungry Ghost girl. “You uh...you OK there, Chay?”

“...I will be.”, she replied.

Husk extended out his wings. “Well, you wanna hitch a ride? It’ll take a few minutes before we get back to the city…”

“Yeah.”. She nodded, quietly. “Yeah….yeah, sure.”

* * *

The hot desert wind whistled through the cliffs. The chaos of the previous hour had simply vanished, like so many other things in the wastelands.

A single, pathetic figure slowly crawled towards a gaping hole in the sand. It glowed green, and smelled like a vat of boiling lye.

His abdomen was….barely existant. His wound was open, and pulsating. He could feel the breath slowly leave him, his senses slowly deaden. His organs would fail him...as long as this bullet remained inside.

He turned over onto his back, sweaty and exhausted. His breath became labored. One arm was completely shattered. The other was barely working, shaking and tingling with pain.

He looked at his wound. It gaped at him, almost mockingly.

He thrust his hand into his wound, nearly passing out from the pain. He needed to get this thing out of him. If he was to rebuild his movement, to serve his master, he could not be erased…

“You’re still here, Profera?”

His eyes weakly looked to his side. Next to him, was a lone figure….a squat figure, dressed in Inferna black, with a metal curiass and gasmask.

Under his right arm, he held a book: the spell book that had served them well in their endeavors.

“Liutenant! My goodness, you did survive!”. He laughed weakly to himself, each chuckle erupting in agony. “Please….master, I think I can survive this! If you could use your dagger, perhaps I can scoop this thing out of me. It may take some time to recover, but I am willing to…”

“No...just stop, Profera.” The Liutenant shook his head, almost sadly.

“..W-what do you mean, master? I have served you well, have I not?”

The Liutenant reached up and pulled his mask from his head. He threw it to the side.

Underneath was a Sinner...orange in color, with scaley eyelids and green hair.

“Yes, Profera. You’ve served with quite well. You did exactly as I needed...but you still failed in the end, I’m afraid.”

“N-Nonsense, master Flynn! This is simply a minor setback! Sure, we may have to start recruting again, but we still have the book…”

The Liutenant giggled to himself. “Oh, yes indeed. I do have the book. But yourself? You have….extended my needs, Profera.

The Liutenant lightly placed the spell book on a nearby rock. He then slowly wandered over to the eviscerated figure of the snake-demon.

“You see, Profera…..now, you are but a loose end.”

He grabbed the snake demon by the throat.

“And I cannot abide loose ends, Profera.”

He dragged the snake demon behind him. Profera shrieked in agony as his wound was dragged across the desert sands.

“You see, Profera...that was always your problem. You’re a dreamer...a rather infuriating dreamer. You’ve always thought of yourself as greater than you actually were. You are quite the artist, I’ll give you that much, and courage you have in great supply!…”

Profera yelped as his would struck an odd pointy rock in the sand.

“But you could never follow through. As long as it served your ego...you cared whether your plans fell apart. That made you a great pawn, you know. I learned a long time ago that, if you stay in the background, you could be the greatest of leaders….”

He stopped at the edge of the glowing pit.

“What is it the Princess likes to say? Oh yes…” His eyes glittered with malicious mischief. “You were always chasing rainbows, Profera.”

“Please….don’t do this, master!”, he attempted to cry out through his crushed trachea.

“Oh, Profera…” The Liutenant slowly turned to look at his now ex-servant, directly in his terrifed eyes.

He grinned, revealing prickly, pointed teeth.

“To keep you is no benefit. To destroy you...is no loss.”

H e tossed the snake-demon, screaming, into the pit.

The Sinner known as Flynn picked the book back up, and gripped it in his arm. He began making the laborious trek back to the city.

Profera would never know if he struck the bottom of the pit...or if there was a bottom.

The only thing he knew...was oblivion.


	14. Epilogue

Chay waved away the steam coming from her cup of Pho. The hot peppers opened up her senses and reinvigorated her energy.

She was standing ouside of the Happy Hotel, peering up at the impressive building. On top of Crol’s apartment building, it seemed quite large. Up close, it was enormous. Intimidating, even.

“Feeling better now?”, Vaggie asked. The moth demon girl was standing next to her, with concerned but caring smile.

“Yeah, I think so.” Chay did not remember much of the previous evening. After Husk picked her up and flew off to the city, she lost consciousness. From what she could gather, Husk had decided to take her back to Husk’s apartment, where he had gently laid her on his couch to sleep off the chaos of the battle.

That had been where she had woken: on Crol’s couch, with the rising sun shining in her eyes.

But there had been no Crol. She had assumed that he had gone back to work, and was probably out in the city puttering around on his cart, slinging soup the way she had met him in the first place.

She spooned some of the rice noodles into her mouth and slurped them down.

“How’s the Pho?”, Vaggie asked.

“Good. Really good. You said this was made in your Hotel kitchen?”

Vaggie giggled. “Yeah, we’ve been assembling a great staff.”

Vaggie put her hand on Chay’s shoulder. “You don’t have to go back to Imp City, you know. You could always stay here…” After waking up and eating breakfast, Chay had wandered over to the Hotel, to see it for herself close up. Vaggie had met up on the doorstep, giving the surprised Hungry Ghost an affectionate hug (rather than a licentious grope, which she had come to expect from these kinds of interactions with Sinners).

Chay shook her head. “I appreciate the invitation. But I have some obligations I have in Imp City to deal with. Besides...Imps aren’t too bad.”

“Yeah, they can be cute little fuckers!”

Angel Dust emerged from the Hotel door, making his way down the stairs. He was wearing a bathrobe, exposing his fluffy chest and...probably more leg than was necessary.

“Don’t bother Chay, Angel Dust. She’s still recovering…”

“Naw, don’t worry. I just gotta talk with her for a bit.”, he replied.

Vaggie shook her head. “Just don’t do anything stupid.”

“Now why would I do somethin’ like that, eh?”, he said, grinning impishly.

Vaggie sighed to herself as she walked back into the Hotel, leaving Chay and Angel Dust behind.

Angel smiled at Chay, warmly. “Bones...thank you.”

“It was just my job, Angel. But I’m glad Shakie is OK.”

“Hey, it wasn’t just her. Cherri to. And you got a bunch of those girls out of there. Charlie’s beside herself with all of the new guests…” 

“Well...that last part was Cherri’s bit. She managed to get them through that portal before it closed up again…” As it turned out, while Chay and Husk were dealing with their suddenly landing in the wasteland, Cherri had managed to free the girls and get them through the garage portal. Crol had been there to meet them when they showed up. The little kobold was more than happy to get them to the Hotel...

Chay laughed through a mouthful of noodles. “Hope they aren’t pestering Shakie...”

“Naw...she’ll be fine. She’s already fittin’ in really well. You shoulda seen her at the Hotel bar last night! Never thought someone could put away that much tequila…Oh! Speak of the devil…”

A small, friendly voice called out from the door. “Miss Ong?”

Chay looked up from her pho. In the doorway was Shakie, wearing a modest tanktop and shorts, smiling meekly but warmly.

“Shakie…it’s good to finally meet you. You know, conscious.”

“You might regret that soon.”, she laughed. “I can be a bit of a buzzkill.”

“Aw, c’mon Shakie!”, Angel said. “You’re a treat!”

“Oh, Angel…Alastor had something to talk to you about. Something about putting a ribbon on his tail?”

“Fuckin’ party pooper...can’t take a decent joke.” Angel Dust marched back through the door grumbling to himself.

Chay watched him walk back up the stoop.  _ I hate to see him leave, but...  _

“Chay? Can I call you Chay?”, Shakie asked her.

T he Hungry Ghost girl turned back to the meek feline-demon. “Yeah, sure. That’s what my friends call me…”

“I...I wanna thank you, for letting me get here and, you know, not sending me back to Valentino.”

Chay shook her head. “I had half an hour with him. That was all the time I needed to know to stay away from him.”

“Yeah...he has that effect on people. He can worm his way into your head, you know. Play on all of your fears and your desires. He told me I was going to be a big star…”

Chay held up her hand. “You don’t have to explain anything to me, Shakie. I’m just glad you made it.”

And she meant it. She wasn’t sure how, but being near Shakie, near this Hotel….it actually made her feel better. Feel  _ good _ .

“Chay...if you’re ever in town, could you visit?”

Chay scratched her nose hole. “Well...I guess. Gonna have to find a less dangerous way of getting here from Imp City, though…”

Chay shoveled more noodles into her mouth, slurping them down through her teeth.

_-Now that I think about it….how am I going to get back to Imp City to begin with?_

T heir conversation was interrupted by the rumble of an engine. 

A motor could be heard, coming up the roadway...only this time, it wasn’t driving _quite_ as recklessly. 

A familiar black Assault Vehicle pulled up to the Hotel. There was no longer any insignia showing on it’s chass is . It was just smooth black, and freshly polished.

There were no flying trashcans or busted water hydrants...just simple, responsible driving.

The driver door popped open.  A squat kobold-demon hopped down onto the pavement.

“Hey Chay!”, Crol shouted as he tossed her the keys. “Look at what I found!”

Chay shook her head, laughing. “ Christ on a stick, Crol….”

He slapped the side of the vehicle. “I decided to use that highway portal one more time. Found this baby in mid-repair in their garage. Decided I could salvage it a little…”

Chay walked around the vehicle, inspecting it’s parts. The tires were fully pumped, the windows were clear...everything was freshly cleaned.

“You did all of this in one morning?”, Chay asked.

“Even got the gas tank filled up. Gun is oiled, to. Like I told ya, Chay…old fashioned hard work.”, he winked at her.

“Yeah….you had to blow someone again, didn’t you?”

The kobold-demon mockingly grabbed his chest, “Oh, Chay my dear! You wound me!”

A vibration came from Chay’s pocket. It was her hellphone. She reached in and looked at the caller ID.

It was Lucius. She hit the answer button.

“This isn’t Viola again, is it?”

“ _What? No, it’s Lu. Has Viola been using my phone?”_

“Only one charger, right?”

“ _Well….yeah, touche. Listen, I just got a message from Val’s people. The debt’s been forgiven.”_

“Good news. Maybe you’ll think twice about who you stick your dick in from now on…”

“… _.Ouch. You wound me_.”

“Well, in the mean time, we need to discuss getting me an office, since we can actually _afford_ one now...”

“ _With the money Val just sent our way, we could afford an entire office complex!”_

“Yeah, and then you can answer a few questions….like how you got Flynn’s gun...”

“ _Oh, hey! I think I hear Viola calling me! Listen, do you need someone to come get you? I’m guessing you’re not going to cross the wasteland on foot.”_

Chay looked over at the Assault Vehicle. She smirked.

“No...I got that taken care of.”

**THE END**

_(Chay Ong will return in Volume 2: If You Want Somebody Gone...”_


End file.
